The Artist's Way

I have dug out my copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way (TAW) again. I have lost count of the times I've attempted to complete this 12 week "course". Cameron says it is a spiritual journey to your creativity, or a creative journey to your spirituality and that the two cannot be separated anyway. However you view the All That Is, Higher Power, God/dess, Universe etc its entire purpose is The Creator and as we are a part of it, not a separate entity bobbing about in it, our base natures are creative also. We are creative beings, so stop saying you can't create and accept it (but she says it nicer, and more long-winded). I have looked for a mention of Dorothea Brande, crediting her for the origin of her Morning Pages but there's nothing in the actual body of the book. Cameron says she began them all by herself while on sabbatical in Mexico. Hmph. I checked the bibliography and she does list Becoming a Writer, saying it is the "best book on writing I have ever found." So that's good.

Last time I attempted TAW I signed the contract at the beginning of the book (in ink!) and was resolved to stick with it. That was 2007. I didn't stick with it. I don't think I've ever made it past Week One. I have no idea why, except life getting in the way and my commitment to my own creative happiness was weak. I even gave my copy away and it has found its way back to me.

I came across another book, Creating a Life Worth Living by Carol Lloyd, last year and a lot of the Amazon reviewers said they had struggled to finish The Artist's Way but this book they had managed to stick with, finding it more expansive and liberating and realistic.

I have CaLWL and started to work with it last year. I like her practical yet off-beat approach to building a creative life. So which do I follow? My creative nemesis that keeps clawing at my face, muttering about Morning Pages and Artist's Dates or a grounded, less bossy, romp to creative joy?

I just know I can't do it on my own! I need someone behind me with a giant whip! I'll never write if I don't focus.

Other things I need to sort out:

• My laptop is broken. I need to tell ASUS they suck and I need a new one, pronto. 
• I need to clear and organise my writing area
• I need to get on with reading the dictionary. I have also been doing this for Lord knows how many years and am not even a quarter way through the As yet. It is a task I have created for my own enjoyment (no seriously, this kind of stuff makes me hard) and part of it is to create my own mini dictionary of favourite words, which I have begun. I need to be more selective though because the A section is already quite big. 
• What, my friends, WHAT I am going to write. Which genre? And what form shall my writing take? I still don't know. I flit between novels, short stories and poems like a drunken bumble bee, occasionally alighting on the enticing bloom of non-fiction before despairing at my own ability to keep air-borne...aaaand the metaphor's over. 
• See? I need to practise! 

Write for Fifteen Minutes

The other daily task that Dorothea Brande's warning pertains to is to write for fifteen minutes at a set time every day. No matter what you're doing at that time, whether you're shopping, in full conversational flow or in the shed looking for the bloody secateurs again, you must stop and write for 15 minutes, about anything. This is also an exercise recommended by Natalie Goldberg in her wonderful book Writing Down the Bones.

My time I have picked is 1.15 pm. This is during Jingle's big daytime nap and usually she is asleep until 2pm. It's my time to eat, clean or read but writing is equally a priority. And fifteen minutes goes so fast when spent on the page.

This may seem like another obligation in an already restrictive routine but I can see how this rigidity will be good for me. And I need to just write. Not thinking or reading about writing, not agonising over an intricate plot line that never manifests but simple writing practice.

No critic, no perfection. Just the ink, the page and me.

Becoming a Writer

Dorothea Brande published Becoming a Writer in 1934. In it, she does not offer instruction on the writer's craft or tools of the trade but instead discusses the writer's inner life - their mind and heart. Her theory is that so many aspiring writers look to published authors as having cracked some sort of code or found a magic elixir and that is how they can call themselves a writer and work as one. She says this is codswallop, there is no magic ingredient, all you need is the discipline and focus to write every day and then you can go on to learn plotting, dialogue etc and be able to make use of the skills you learn. To do this, she says a writer must live as two people, splitting the self into the creative, unconscious-driven part and the out-in-the-world business-like part - the part that edits, rewrites and promotes the fruit of the creative's labours.

Her first task in order to "live as a writer" is to write every morning for as long as you can, preferably while still in bed. I am familiar with Julia Cameron's Morning Pages (writing three pages of unedited longhand after rising) from The Artist's Way and I am supposing that Cameron has lifted it from Brande. This proves that it must have some merit and use. I have attempted Morning Pages (as I will call them from now on) for so many years. I think the longest I stayed with them was two months or so. I have experienced benefit from them, but having not set out a time in the day to formally write I have not fully integrated the practice into my life. This I must do.

The first time I read Brande's book I was pleased with the familiar task and wrote upon waking for a good few weeks. But I didn't keep it up, and I didn't designate a set time of day to work on my "official" writing. I was pregnant at the time and other things took precedence eventually (namely sleep). But Brande gives a warning at the end of Chapter 6 that stops my heart and chills my blood!

'Right here I should like to sound the solemnest word of warning that you will find in this book: If you fail repeatedly at this exercise, give up writing. Your resistance is greater than your desire to write, and you may as well find some other outlet for your energy as of late.' -p79

While I agree that the resistance in the past was great than the desire, I have overcome these and now am locked-in, booted-up and ready to go. The thought of never writing, even though my writing life up to this point has been rather skeletal and dry, fills me with such panic, horror and dread for the future and it's all I can do not to throw the book across the room and howl in despair.

I love proving people wrong. I love doing the opposite of expectation. So Dorothea Brande can go whistle, because I can do as she asks and I will, one day, write fluently on demand as she promises.

The reason why I listen to this woman is because in the proceeding chapters before this heartless warning she writes lovingly of me. Me and my soul. Of the writer immobilised by fear, by self-consciousness, by embarrassment that one could perfect this craft and take on that lofty title of "writer". She knows what's in writers' hearts and yearning souls, and she offers reassurance and guidance.

So, Job One. Morning Pages. I'm on it.

Welcome and hello to none and all!

Third wave for this blog now and now it has a purpose, a directive, a sticker saying "this is what this is". I shall attempt to stay on track and not wander down mindless avenues for my own amusement but shall strive to blog only about my learningments in the writing arena, my actual scribblements (getting annoying yet?) and how life with a six year-old (Bingle) and an eight month-old (Jingle) are aiding/preventing me from writing.


My ambition is to enter a short story competition this year.


I have not written formally or even studied the necessary components of the writer's craft for so long that I am what you might call a little rusty. But this is where I dive in, just getting on with the job and not worrying about whether the job is perfect or not.


I am a writer, damn it, and I am writing. So, in conclusion: hurrah!