‘I thought drink and drugs enabled my creativity’: Julia Cameron on the drama behind The Artist’s Way
Elle Hunt www.theguardian.com elle-hunt
When even Hunter S Thompson tells you to take it easy, you must be overdoing it. The bestselling author talks about marrying Martin Scorsese, sobering up, and writing a bestseller
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the Guardian
The first and only rule of morning pages is that you must do them every morning – no exceptions. In practice, everyone makes exceptions. But, in the more than 30 years in which Julia Cameron has started her day by writing down three pages of stream-of-conscious thoughts, she has only ever missed one. That was years ago, when she was travelling to New York from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over several flights. Her cherished morning routine was lost in transit. The impact of the disruption is what Cameron, 74, remembers.

“I felt scattered and disorganised, and unable to think clearly,” she says, sounding dismayed all these years later. Then she brightens. “I realised: oh my God, the morning pages really shaped my life.”

She started the habit in her 30s, just after her divorce from film director Martin Scorsese, as she battled alcoholism and cocaine addiction – and raised their baby daughter. In all this chaos, she settled on three handwritten pages as an achievable target, no matter how difficult it might seem.

Cameron’s morning pages have, also, of course, shaped the lives of millions of others. They are a central tenet of her bestselling book The Artist’s Way: a publishing phenomenon that still connects with people 30 years after it was first published. The book is a practical guide to “creativity as a spiritual practice” and has sold more than 4m copies since it came out in 1992.

Over the 12-week course it lays out, Cameron leads the reader through exercises to “discover and recover” their inner artist, which she believes is often buried by factors such as fear of judgment or shame. Much of the strategy and advice in the Artist’s Way is common sense, such as protecting time for creativity and prioritising play. But Cameron’s whimsical, idiosyncratic voice elevates it beyond the obvious.

On the page, she is compassionate and cajoling, convincing you of your capability and jollying you along with anecdotes about her Hollywood years. I’m not surprised to find that Cameron is just as lively and engaging in person – but I am touched by the interest she shows in me.

She has even dressed up for our call, her berry-coloured lipstick matching her glasses and her hair in a loose up-do. I apologise for my own relative scruffiness. “I wanted to look particularly nice,” Cameron says. “Then I woke up this morning, and I thought, ‘Oh dear! My hair is all awry!’”

She recently revisited her 2006 memoir Floor Sample, now published for the first time in the UK. “I found myself feeling that maybe it’s time to give people a glimpse of the artist behind The Artist’s Way,” she says.

“I was able to take a look at exactly how very resilient I had been as an artist. I hadn’t allowed adversity to stop me.” It’s true that in reading Floor Sample I was flabbergasted by the turbulence, hardship and angst that Cameron has endured over her life – as well as the matter-of-fact, even sanguine way she recounts it.

Growing up in Libertyville, Illinois, Cameron was the second-eldest of seven children, born to parents who treasured music and literature. She was only allowed to watch films that received an A-grade for decency – but she could read whatever she liked, fostering a passion for writing.

Living in Washington, in her early 20s, Cameron talked her way into an office job at the Washington Post, and then a byline. She became known for snappy, stylish pieces on everything from nail polish trends to politics. When her bosses suggested she might like to do her actual administrative job, she quit to freelance.

Her big break came when she interviewed the children of the Watergate conspirator E Howard Hunt, a scoop for Rolling Stone. She had a hot new career and a new journalist crowd, “many of them heavy drinkers”. Cameron fitted right in, to such an extent that Hunter S Thompson told her she might like to cut back on the booze. “Five nights out of six, you are the best date in town,” she says he told her. “But on that sixth night …”

But drinking had become central to Cameron’s identity as a hard-nosed, hard-living reporter and her mounting sense of herself as an aspiring spiritual artist.

Striving for control, she imposed rules: no hard spirits, don’t drink and write – unless she had amphetamines to keep her lucid. “I thought that the drinking and the drug use were enabling my creativity … We have a mythology that tells us artists should be drunk and in pain.” But by 1976, she had graduated to cocaine – and married Scorsese.

They met when Cameron was sent to profile the then up-and-coming director. The commission was spiked after their interview concluded in his hotel suite (where she zhooshed up the script for Taxi Driver). Cameron writes in her memoir that she knew within seconds of meeting Scorsese that they would marry; she even called her mother to say so, halfway through their interview.

Their daughter Domenica, an artist, was born within a year of their wedding. The relationship tarnished Cameron’s reputation as a journalist – one editor advised her to get a divorce – but it led to opportunities in screenwriting. Had she stayed married to Scorsese, The Artist’s Way would not have been written, says Cameron. “He was very generous; he shared his films with me and wanted to use my talents – and I was delighted to do that … I would have spent my time aiding and abetting and helping him.”

But Cameron’s escalating reliance on alcohol and cocaine – plus Scorsese’s highly public affair with Liza Minnelli while making New York, New York – put pressure on the marriage. They divorced the following year, after Cameron was hospitalised with a nervous breakdown.

She finally hit rock bottom and got help. “When I started getting sober, I was told that I had to pray,” Cameron says. “I said: ‘Prayer? Not me!’

“They said: ‘You must believe in something.’ I thought about it and then I realised that I believed in a line from Dylan Thomas: ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, that particular creative energy that makes something grow to be a petunia or a pansy …

“It struck me as being far more benevolent than the concepts of God that I had grown up with.” The thought freed her own tortured artist, facilitating free and full expression; she has been sober for 44 years.

God looms large in The Artist’s Way as – Cameron explains – a shorthand for some kind of creative force or higher power working through us, and the strange synchronicity and mysticism of making art. Now, when she writes her morning pages, Cameron will explicitly address “the Great Creator” or “Little Julie”, her younger self, and ask for guidance. “Then I listen, and I write down what I hear.”

That has included past directives to go to New Mexico (“this was before New Mexico was chic”), and even which route to take there; she went on to split her time between there, Los Angeles and New York.

In the late 80s, she began to test her approach on her fellow “blocked” artist friends and students of the creative writing programmes she was teaching in New York. When her course notes were passed around, Cameron began to circulate photocopies, then selling them for $20.

Word of mouth led them to be picked up by what is now an imprint of Penguin; the first run was just 9,000 copies. On Zoom, triumph glints behind Cameron’s glasses. “They thought: ‘It’s a little teeny California woo-woo book.’ It was only once we had sold about 100,000 copies that they said: ‘Maybe we should pay some attention to this.’”

Was she surprised by the response? No, she says – not because of ego, but because of the wide range of test subjects she had had in her creativity workshops. “Lawyers, judges, sculptors, actors, writers, housewives, accountants, ballerinas – all were finding that they opened up to their creativity through using the tools.”

“What I say is: you’re falling in love with yourself,” she says. “When you write your three pages, you’re sending a telegram to the universe, saying: ‘This is what I like. This is what I want more of. This is what I want less of.’”

She advises doing the pages immediately on waking, before your mental defences are up (and certainly before looking at your phone) – and only three pages. Any more feeds the ego, she says, in itself a block to free creativity.

However, “There is no wrong way to write morning pages,” says Cameron. “It can be as negative as you wish, as positive as you wish, about an issue which is deep or shallow.”

My unbroken streak of morning pages is nowhere near Cameron’s, but, even in my stints of three weeks or so, I have found that they settle me for the rest of the day, a bit like going for a run first thing. The effect is to bring whatever might be rolling around in your subconscious mind out into the open: whether latent desires or uncomfortable truths. For instance, Cameron mentions someone who was forced to confront their problem drinking after realising all their daily pages mentioned a hangover.

The other pillar of The Artist’s Way is “artist’s dates”: a weekly sojourn, specifically to inspire. Like the morning pages, it is simple to do and hard to maintain. But, with consistency and commitment, Cameron swears, “It does transform lives.”

“One of the things I really love is that it forces you to take ownership of your creativity,” the actor Ito Aghayere tells me. Aghayere stumbled upon Cameron’s book in 2018, while feeling adrift not long after moving to LA; within six months, she had landed a CBS show. Most recently, she has appeared in Star Trek: Picard.

She says the book changed her life: “It’s an existential journey into rediscovering that sense of possibility that we can all engage with, no matter what industry you’re in … I’ve bought so many copies for friends.”

It’s not just the conviction of Cameron’s celebrity following that is telling, it’s the diversity. Fans include Patricia Cornwell, Reese Witherspoon, Pete Townshend, Alicia Keys and John Cleese, while Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, has completed the entire course at least three times.

Cameron is always being confronted by the impact she has made. “People will come up to me and say, ‘Here’s the book that I wrote’, or ‘the necklace that I made’, or ‘I have my own one-woman show now’. I’m so grateful to think that my work has been a building block in someone else’s.”

No one is exempt. Underpinning The Artist’s Way is Cameron’s belief that everyone is creative and capable of becoming more so. “We all have an inner spark,” Cameron says – and her books give us permission to pursue it. “What I have found is that people read The Artist’s Way with a sense of relief: ‘Oh, so I’m not crazy.’”

Could she imagine her own life without the morning pages?

“No,” she answers, with certainty. “And I don’t want to.”

This article was amended on 21 August 2022 to remove a personal detail.