When your Defector Pals announced the plan to start Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, none of us imagined unlocking our creativity would come with actual physical pain. But we are going to be brave and trust the process. Week 1 of The Artist's Way was an introduction to the practice. This week, we read about the self-sabotaging "blurts" that come out from our inner critics, and practiced paying attention to them without giving them too much power. We also have our first week of daily morning pages under our belt! Kathryn, Ray, Sabrina, Chris, and Alex all started Week 1 last week and, as promised, we are here to share our end-of-week reflections.
If you're following along at home, we'd love to see your responses in the comments, too.
A note for next week: We are off on Monday, Jan. 20, so we'll do our group check-in for Week 2 on Tuesday, and it'll publish Wednesday.
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you?
Alex Sujong Laughlin: I did my morning pages all seven days! I have really enjoyed the process so far, especially when I do it in front of my SAD lamp. I have to admit I'm already a pretty big journaler so the main difference between this and my usual routine is that I'm writing more and consistently in the morning. I've begun to really look forward to emptying my brain out, though, which is not what morning pages felt like the first time I attempted The Artist's Way.
Ray Ratto: Six, but I skipped today because I was doing blogs for the oppressors who pay me. I'm not a journaler at all, so I had difficulty getting past the notion that this was more chore than fun, which is one of the many holes in my creativity game. I'm trying to discern if this is something that works for me, and so far the only thing I managed to create was an irrational hatred of Julia Cameron. I am a work, and not necessarily one in progress, let alone making any. But I shall soldier on.
Alex: I am so amazed to know so many of you are not already regular journalers! My writing life began in my journals and I feel like it's the place where I incubate everything.
Chris Thompson: I did morning pages every day. I feel similarly to Ray, I think: This was very hard for me, and I feel very irrationally angry at Julia Cameron. Alex, your journaling behavior sounds cool to me, and like a smart way to generate and grow ideas. I, a moron, could never pull it off.
Sabrina Imbler: I, too, am not a regular journaler, and was primarily drawn to TAW as a way of forcing myself to journal. I did morning pages five out of the seven days; I skipped two days because I had an unusually hectic work schedule and woke up late. At first, as Cameron predicted, some of my morning pages were devoted to railing against the notion of morning pages. But I began enjoying the experience more as the days went on, and when I built in two breaks during the process to allow my hand to un-cramp.
Kathryn Xu: I've felt somewhat awful about the state of my morning pages. I'm horrible at maintaining my sleep schedule, so like Sabs, I also skipped two days when I had blogs I needed to write for the site, and I fudged the page count on a couple of the days. In terms of the physical act of writing, I think I benefit from not being far out from college, where I was taking handwritten notes during lectures; still, my hand was in cramp town, if not cramp city, especially at the start. Also throwing it back to college, I'm immediately proffering an excuse for some of my failings: I was trapped in car-dependent suburban New Jersey and thus barred from having any strange and wonderful experiences of note to write about.
Alex: I'm curious to hear more from Ray and Chris about your anger toward Julia. I have some guesses, but I'd love if you could share more.
Chris: I think some part of it is just that my hand hurts and my callus is very gross.
Ray: I needed to be mad at someone, and I can never be mad at Alex. I'm sure Julia is a nice person and all, but if it has to be someone's fault, well, she's right there. Blame delegation is a very important creative skill, too. Also, I am completely zeroed out when it comes to expressing myself except in a journalistic framework, as the first-person has pretty well been beaten out of me. Besides, I'd rather look into the soul of some owner who has none than my own.
Chris: It was my understanding from the reading that the morning pages are supposed to be sort of cathartic, an emptying out that removes the anxieties that might interrupt a person's creative process. But they were the exact opposite for me. By the time I finished my pages each morning—a genuinely grueling exercise, I cannot stress enough that my hands are hamburger by the time I've completed three pages—I was in a panic about all the better ways I could've used the time. Some of this is personal. The morning is the part of the day when I have some breathing space to read the news and think productively about work, before my kid wakes up and all hell breaks loose, and time condenses, and I have to start actually putting words in order.
I'm also an unbelievably slow writer, by hand, so I could never complete a thought before it'd been overrun by the next one. Genuinely a deranging exercise. I hate it!
Kathryn: I'm curious about the structure of everyone’s morning pages, and what they wound up mostly writing about. I found that I defaulted a lot to writing lists of things and borrowing some Josina Anderson–style syntax, in either stream-of-consciousness, or word count–padding, depending on how you look at it.
Sabrina: My first few entries were almost exclusively devoted to describing my varying mucus levels from a sickness that has plagued me off and on for a few months, and then wrapping up by writing vibe-based synopses of the X-Files episodes I watched the night before. But now my entries have mostly shifted to recounting what happened the day before, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, involves naming the things I did that I feel ashamed of or embarrassed about, which has actually resulted in those things taking up less space in my brain than if I hadn't written them down, I think.
Alex: Wow, I also wrote about mucus! Almost all of my entries followed a similar structure where I started with acknowledging the day of the week and what that meant for my schedule and then getting into either how I was feeling about the day ahead or what bad dreams I'd had the night before, or both. Usually by the end of the three pages I was on my way to a blog of some sort, which was handy. I also found that I was journaling a lot more throughout the day as well, between meetings or before bed, so morning pages became a place to fill in missed plot in my day.
Kathryn: I also wrote about mucus, in the sense that I was getting a lot of unproductive thoughts about falling back down the K-pop rabbithole off my chest, and it was similarly good to put it down on paper, instead of letting it rattle around in my brain. Not unlike the experience of expelling gross bodily fluids. Knowing that I was almost certainly never going to look at these pages again let me turn off the shame center of my brain and write some truly depraved sentences.
Ray: I didn't know mucus was available as a topic.
Sabrina: Ray, next week I expect you to have a mucus treatise. And Alex, that's amazing that you found yourself landing at a blog-adjacent point. I admit it never even crossed my mind to try to write about, or for, work in my morning pages, just the many spiraling anxieties and obsessions I have on my own time. One morning, I wrote my pages single-spaced in the teeny lines of my notebook and it was the most loathsome thing I've ever seen, so I'm back to doing five-ish pages double-spaced.
Ray: Pro, con, or value-neutral?
Sabrina: Surprise me!
Kathryn: Yeah, Alex, I'm also really impressed with hand-writing blogs. I like the innovation in the "CMS vs. word processor" debate space, and I think trying that would be really helpful for days I have blogging to do, rather than skipping morning pages entirely.
Alex: There was once an era when I could only write blogs by hand. Thankfully that is over now, but it's still my main method for getting unstuck!
Chris: The third page of my Friday journal entry was just "ABCDE…." in huge font several times, followed by an expletive. I was near tears, I swear. (I switched to typed pages on Saturday, and I may not go back.)
Ray: Chris, you may be holding your pen a little tightly.
Chris: Just hard enough to force it into my jugular, when the moment strikes.
Did you do your artist date this week? What did you do? How did it feel?
Alex: So I am doing the most disgusting thing ever and doing The Artist's Way with my husband. We have been doing our morning pages together most mornings and talking about our blurts and our inner critics and everything, and we decided to do our artist dates simultaneously, too. On Saturday, we walked downtown and I reserved the piano room in my local library for an hour, and he took photos with a new filter we got for our camera. Then we met up and had lunch! It was so cute!
Chris: That sounds amazing! I did not do my artist date this week. I intended to, and sincerely thought that I would. And then there was just never an honest moment for it.
This is not where my head is supposed to be, but I can't help it! I can't help but think of the example Cameron chooses in the chapter for the first week, "Recovering a Sense of Safety," when she had every example from her history available to her, and the person she chose was a 30-something millionaire stock trader. It occurs to me that her demographics are hilariously self-selecting. If I were a millionaire trader, or a millionaire of any stripe, I would do nothing but artist dates.
But! I intend to get an artist date in this week, so help me.
Ray: Alex, can I borrow your husband for awhile? Frankly, this part intimidates me a bit, so I went out and bought her book and am trying to find the necessary inspiration that way.
Sabrina: I actually also started out this week doing TAW with my partner, and had this beautiful vision of an experience that sounds like your real-life experience, Alex. But my partner is actually a big nighttime journaler, and when they started journaling in the morning their whole routine was messed up and they had insomnia all week, so we had to have an intervention where they are now doing their morning pages at night.
I also did not do my artist's date this week, at least formally, because I unfortunately had to spend the last two weekends working on personal creative work, and when I had finished those tasks all I wanted to do was consume trash and be dumb.
Alex: OK! I wanna say consuming trash counts as artist date.
Sabrina: Haha, in that case I had an artist's date every single day!
Ray: Oh, I can now see my definition of art was too lofty. I can trash with the best of them.
Kathryn: If consuming trash counts as an artist's date, then I was doing a lot of it (watching Korean variety shows, learning a lot about this one idol's affection for fish, etc.). If I stretch the definition to let me puzzle in silence at the library, with my sisters as peripheral figures but not conversational options, I also did that a couple of times. So, kind of hitting the polar opposites of low attention span materials vs. full concentration time.
Alex: She had a line when she was explaining the artist dates that I found useful: "In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty." So my gut for what "counts" is anything that makes you feel fizzy or a little delighted. When we were on our walk, it started snowing and there were these perfect little snowflakes that landed on my coat, and I was so delighted by them that I feel like that experience alone could have counted. (Also I know I'm erring dangerously close to Disney princess territory here, and I apologize for how extremely into all of this I am!)
Kathryn: That is useful, though I still do want to have a proper, conscientious artist's date this week (perhaps two!) that pushes me to do something I want to do but am usually too lazy for. Sometimes I need to be forced to have fun!
Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.
Sabrina: Something I did do this weekend that felt entwined with TAW is that I wrote out a letter to my new penpal, and I could tell that my handwriting had visibly improved from my week of practicing longhand. That was genuinely exciting to me. I have always hated my handwriting, and I think part of that hatred comes from the fact that I cannot write as fast as I am thinking, and so my words become erratic and unreadable and overall quite hideous. But I've realized that my handwriting is passable if I just write slowly, and I can't believe it's taken me this long to realize this.
Kathryn: I've had the opposite relationship with handwriting things! My handwriting is tiny and starts out neat and then usually turns unreadable. I find hand-writing helpful in terms of physically making it more difficult to go back and edit things. Also, I enjoy copyediting marks/seeing physical evidence of edits, but that's not as relevant to morning pages. I used to engage in slightly depraved fitting-two-lines-of-writing-in-one-college-ruled-line behavior, which I always found satisfying to the effect of saving the trees and tiling up space, but is probably a habit better shed.
Ray: I'm coming to realize how gripped I am by the way I've always approached writing, and creativity in general. The journaling has been OK, but thinking outside my usual methodologies is more difficult than I thought it would be. I may be less curious than I should be about a lot of things, or am curious about a lot of things in a more passive way. I'm not sure. This, too, must be Julia's fault. In the meantime, I'm going to figure out where my brain is at and try to find a way through whatever blockage might be involved here.
Alex: A thing that has surprised me in listening to my inner critic this past week was realizing how much of my negative self-talk comes directly from one person, a family member who told me when I was little that I lacked discipline. I was five or six, and as an adult I can talk back in my head: What child of that age doesn’t wiggle and squirm??? How could you say that to a little kid? But that belief about myself has taken root so deeply that I feel like I'm always responding to it. Even being able to articulate that to myself has been helpful because now I know if I hear those things in my head, they're probably not true.
Kathryn: I'm once again hinging too much on the fact that being in Philadelphia will fix all of my struggles with actually taking up the various tasks I had to do this week, but doing this project alongside being in suburban New Jersey has really reinforced how much a locale shapes my brain. The combination of a cold snap, having to drive places to do things, and not having regular interaction with strangers or semi-strangers put a big damper on pretty much everything in my brain, and I'm glad to be temporarily free of it.
Chris: This is somewhat corny, and possibly a copout, but my mind shuts off when I consider this question. I feel like so far this exercise hits me exactly at the juncture of several Issues, some practical and some emotional and some that amount to lazy habits. I imagine a congealed and hard-shelled thing and this process is intended to break it down, but has only begun to scuff up the surface. Ask me again next week!
