If Your New Year’s Resolutions Have Crashed Already, Try This Instead
Sarah Spellings Andrew Sean Greer Jenny Berg Maria Goldbach Emma Specter Héloïse Salessy Daniel Rodgers Chloe Schama Hannah Jackson Condé Nast
A cult-favorite self-help book on creativity is all the more popular in the pandemic era.
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Vogue
Author Julia Cameron’s directive is simple: Write three pages, longhand, without stopping every morning. If you don’t have anything to say, just put down “I don’t have anything to write.” Maybe you’ve heard this piece of advice, from Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, before. Essentially a rebranded journal, the morning pages have become a household name, a shorthand for unlocking your creative potential, or, in the language of the book, “unblocking your inner artist.” On page eight of the book, Cameron recognizes this practice as “apparently pointless.” But that’s part of the charm—bring your most inane, inconsequential, self-absorbed drivel and throw it onto the page. Then leave it. Maybe one day you’ll start to see patterns, hidden dreams, or callings in the texts, but that’s really secondary to the practice of writing it down. In essence, it promises creativity as a final destination—no matter how meandering the path to achieving it may be.

First published in 1992 in a batch of 9,000, The Artist’s Way has become a cult favorite. Ironically Tarcher/Penguin, the book’s publisher, was initially concerned that it wouldn’t sell given its genre-defying nature, a precursor to the current trend for mindfulness, The Artist’s Way falls somewhere between “religious” or “self-help,” but fits neither. It’s still a best seller on Amazon and is back-ordered on Bookshop.org. The 25th-anniversary edition features praise from the likes of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and Cameron’s ex-husband, director Martin Scorsese, on its back cover. More than 4 million copies have been sold worldwide since 1992, and 150,000 in 2020 alone (a significant increase from 2019, according to Penguin Random House). With its mustard-color front cover and maroon lettering, the book itself is decidedly unphotogenic, and yet I’ve seen it more on social media in the past year than ever before, a quiet way of announcing to the world, “Yes, I am working on myself.”

Over the course of 2020, Cameron has taught three classes over Zoom: a one-day class with 465 people in May and another for 249 students in September, and delivered a keynote speech for more 400 people in November. Word of the sessions spread like wildfire. A friend and publicist, Laura Gittoes, told me that she was recommended The Artist’s Way by a friend in Australia and a mover in Brooklyn (she later recommended it to me). Sophia Li, a journalist, director, and Artist’s Way devotee, says she can name 10 people off the top of her head whom she has got into The Artist’s Way. “I posted about finishing my notebook [on Instagram]. I’ll get 20 messages about it from friends and random people,” she says. “And before, at least in my world, no one had heard about it or cared enough and now everyone is like, ‘Oh, I’m doing that too!’” She was first recommended the book by an energy healer and has been doing morning pages for four years. Indya Brown, my former colleague who recently moved to Los Angeles, said a septuagenarian vintage dealer told her that everyone in the city was obsessed with their “pages.” “The book has been its own best emissary,” Cameron agrees. Especially, as the phrase goes, “in these times.”

People often find The Artist’s Way in times of struggle and change. Cameron herself conceived of The Artist’s Way after she became sober in 1978. She was a writer, and had believed that creativity and drinking went together “like scotch and soda.” In that transitional period, she realized that what she believed in—really believed in like a religion—was creative energy. “Before that, I wanted to be a real brilliant smarty-pants,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, wearing pink glasses, and speaking gently and close to the camera. “And after I got sober, I wanted to be more of service, more useful, and more clear in my writing. And my writing untangled itself, and so did my career.”

The Artist’s Way was realized as a 12-week program, a parallel with AA programs, with each week giving the reader tasks: Write down all the people you’re jealous of and why; imagine what you would do if you were 20 and had money, and conversely if you were 65 and had money; bake something; list down traits you liked about yourself as a child; make five arguments on why you can’t believe in God (accompanied by the parenthetical, “God can take it.”) Each week is centered around doing morning pages and taking yourself on an “artist’s date,” an amount of time, alone, to let your inner creative child roam. Amid the pandemic, Cameron is asked often what people should do for the date. “Well, you can take a bubble bath,” she says, settling into a long list. “Well, you can light a candle. Well, you can sketch. Well, you can listen to some music you don’t normally listen to. Well, you can listen to a strange podcast. Well, you can paint your fingernails and your toenails with Swarovski crystals. It helps to not be too sophisticated. It helps to do something an 8-year-old would enjoy.”

While the book itself is a logical approach to creativity (write your pages and reap the benefits), it’s exceedingly gentle and free-flowing. But Cameron doesn’t really seem to care if you do the 12-week program as a workbook, as a regimented class, solo, in a group, or even at all, just as long as you do your morning pages. The book’s instructions are gentle. “Make this phrase a mantra: Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong,” reads the first task for week 7. An emphasis is placed on straightforward, low-stakes fun, like taking a bubble bath or placing a dinosaur figurine on your desk while you work, as Cameron does. But lest you be skeptical of her somewhat kooky methods, the end goal is always clear: to help you unlock your creative potential.

“People are in a deeper sense of awareness right now,” says Jacob Nordby, an author who helps Cameron organize the Zoom sessions, and also moderates audience questions. “‘Do I love my life? What can I change?’ Sometimes that generates a sense of hopelessness. I think that’s why these practices are so useful and why people come to these courses.” And it can feel like a luxury to devote time to your creative child amid, well, everything. “I sometimes think we should do it out of vanity,” Cameron says. “What happens from the front of the room, watching people work with the tools is people become more relaxed, open, and festive. Their humor returns. Right now that’s a very important thing…. I think people have built up introspection due to the closing down of many avenues for their creativity. I think for many people they’ve had grief from a loss of structure. So they’re attracted to a program that’s laid out logically and they’re able to embrace it without resistance.”

Pulling profound conclusions from a task as quotidian as keeping a diary is somewhat of a Cameron specialty. Her new book, out this month, is called The Listening Path. “I realized the tools of morning pages, artist’s dates, and walking were all tools that tuned us into ourselves—they were listening tools,” Cameron says. “People are very interesting if you don’t cut them off. And they often say things that are surprising.” It’s a six-week program: The first step is to listen to your environment, then your peers, then your higher self, then “behind the veil,” to your heroes or others who have passed (Cameron stops to acknowledge that this was when she worried people would think she was too “woo-woo”), then to the silence. The goal with The Listening Path is more esoteric than with The Artist’s Way—your senses will be heightened, and you’ll be surprised by what you find in the silence—but the potential rewards are boundless.

It may feel silly in a time of crisis to, say, draw a bubble bath to help with your problems, but this low barrier to entry is part of the appeal. Nordby tells me that his father gave him the book while Nordby was struggling in the 2008 financial crisis, when he was 34 and had three young children. Working in a warehouse for a government agency, delivering boxes, Nordby started keeping morning pages, which led him to start his writing career. “I found the morning pages practice to become this kind of lifeline to some sense of peace, a little bit of anxiety release,” he says. “It began to take hold.” This accessibility makes Cameron stand out in the world of spirituality—just pick up a pen, write, and see what you find. Alternatively, listen. Li gets to the heart of it: “Amidst the $5K spiritual retreats with modern gurus and trips to Bali to ‘find ourselves,’ Julia doesn’t overcomplicate, glorify, or brand the journey of spirituality or sell a quest to find ourselves. Her simple tools prove that the journey to find oneself happens with intention, not money.”