“The Artist’s Way” in an Age of Self-Promotion
creativity
Carrie Battan Sarah Larson Louis Menand Parul Sehgal Condé Nast
Carrie Battan on Julia Cameron’s creativity-focussed self-help book, “The Artist’s Way,” which remains popular twenty-five years after its publication.
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The New Yorker
In 1989, a director named Julia Cameron débuted her first feature film, “God’s Will,” in Washington, D.C. The movie, a romantic comedy about an orphan, did not receive the kind of rave reviews that Cameron had hoped for. One critic from the Washington Post panned it, accusing Cameron of having ripped off most of her dialogue from “Casablanca.” But for Cameron the scathing review became a tool to reinforce a particular world view: artistic people must learn how to emotionally guard themselves against the tides of negativity—both external and internal.

Two years later, Cameron would publish “The Artist’s Way,” a book that can be classified as self-help but is more like common sense. Billed as “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self,” the book is a program designed to help readers reject the devils of self-doubt on their shoulders and pursue creative activity not as a profession but as a form of therapy. At the core of the process is a ritual called “morning pages,” based on the belief that writing out three pages of free-form writing, in longhand, each morning, will unclog one’s mental and emotional channels of all the muck that gets in the way of being happy, productive, and creative. Simple enough. The other essential ritual involves taking oneself on an “artist’s date” each week—planning an outing to a museum or some other site of inspiration, free from the weight of obligation or work. Sounds a little woo-woo, and it is. And yet “The Artist’s Way,” in its twenty-five-year life span, has been mostly immune to the typical scorn that shrouds so many similar books. It’s a cynic’s self-help book that passes gently through the world by word of mouth. Last year, no fewer than six friends from divergent corners of my life mentioned the book to me in a span of two months. Cameron would call this synchronicity.

The book’s success lies in the simplicity of its message. Cameron has a knack for anthropomorphizing emotions themselves and reframing negative thought. She urges readers to find their inner naysayers, name them, and then learn how to dismiss them as though they’re nothing but annoying neighbors. (Hypnotists employ similar techniques.) Cameron also demonstrates the ways that our emotions are separate from our minds, and can be manipulated for our benefit: “Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not,” she writes. “Anger is our friend. Not a nice friend. Not a gentle friend. But a very, very loyal friend. It will always tell us when we have been betrayed.” I would not be surprised if the creators of the recent Pixar film “Inside Out,” in which a young girl’s emotions are rendered as creatures, were loyal “Artist’s Way” fans. By the same token, Cameron doesn’t pretend to have all of the answers to navigating creative industries. She won’t tell you how to score an agent or ace an audition. She understands that nobody wants to take advice about how to make it in Hollywood from someone who never managed to make it in Hollywood. Instead, she prods her readers to channel their energies inward and respond to their own desires rather than those of the marketplace.

When Cameron published “The Artist’s Way,” in 1991, she probably could not have foreseen exactly how the very idea of creativity would collide with the marketplace. “Creative” sits right above “innovation” and “disruption” in the glossary of terms that have been co-opted by corporate America and retooled to signify an increasingly nebulous set of qualities. Consultants are now creative consultants; advertising agencies are now creative agencies. “Creative” was among the top ten most used words in LinkedIn profiles last year, and, these days, “creative” is a noun that can be used for anyone in the workforce who doesn’t engage in doctoring, lawyering, writing code, or doing hard labor. Affixing the word “creative” to something is the quickest way to make it sound virtuous, and creativity has almost become a moral imperative. And yet today the “creative class” no longer calls to mind a generation of struggling artists, but a group of college graduates with soft skills and Internet-based jobs they have difficulty explaining to their parents.

Cameron herself knows the difficulties of protecting one’s relationship with art and with creativity from the forces of commerce—she’s in the strange and knotty position of having gotten rich off of advising people how to be creative without the goal of getting rich in mind. Since its initial publication, “The Artist’s Way” has sold a reported four million copies and inspired Cameron to produce dozens of spinoffs. In addition to the initial text, she has also published a book specifically dedicated to morning pages and another to her sacred “artist dates,” guidebooks for fearful and struggling writers, a book for people who want to apply her tools to their business practices (something of an ideological contradiction there), and a book about raising creative children. Her latest installment, which arrived last month, is called “It’s Never Too Late Again.” Geared toward those on the brink of retirement—Cameron’s peers—this book repurposes the ideas introduced in “The Artist’s Way” for readers in late middle age, many of whom have just begun retirement and find themselves with a surplus of free time.

The foundations remain the same as those in “The Artist’s Way,” but Cameron introduces a couple of new ideas. Like all of her teachings, they are disarmingly simple. Anyone who whines that they’ll be too old by the time they learn something new—the trumpet, watercolor, screenwriting—she reminds that they’ll be just as old whether they try the new thing or not. (Why not try it?) In this book, she emphasizes the importance of walking, explaining that everyone should set aside twenty minutes twice a week and take a walk without a destination in mind or a cell phone in hand. She also prompts her readers to try to recall specific aspects of various points in their lives, from childhood until the present, loosely forming a kind of memoir. There is no grandiose outcome promised or sleight of hand happening here—as she has done for nearly three decades, Cameron is simply encouraging her readers to be a bit more open, more patient, and kinder to themselves.

Though Cameron has addressed readers of nearly every stage and walk of life in her books, there remains a demographic who could benefit from teachings tailored to their specific needs. If I could, I would request an edition of “The Artist’s Way” that speaks to twentysomethings, who’ve grown up online and then entered the so-called freelance economy, wherein workers are more likely to cobble together a piecemeal career of diverse gigs than secure nine-to-five jobs with benefits and opportunities for growth. In this economy, we’re encouraged to think of units of time in dollar amounts, and to come up with inventive—creative, even—ways to monetize every last fledgling skill we possess.

This life chafes against the lessons of “The Artist’s Way,” rendering them almost impossible to follow. Hobbies are now necessarily productive. If you’re learning piano, you must try to record the jingle for that commercial your friend directed. If you develop a curiosity about a niche topic, you must start an online newsletter dedicated to it, work to build your audience, and then try to monetize the newsletter. If you have a nice speaking voice, you must start a podcast. We’re encouraged to be “goal-oriented” and rewarded with outsize praise for everything we’ve accomplished, and so we feel that we need to turn every creative pursuit into a professional one. This makes some of Cameron’s lessons more urgent than ever. But, unlike earlier generations of readers, we don’t need Cameron to protect us from the voices telling us to doubt ourselves. What we need, instead, are new voices granting us permission to try new things in private—and then leave them be.