The Artist's Way - A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity: A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self

FOREWARD

This is the grand twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Artist’s Way. How deeply it has ef­fected so many people. Back in the early ’90s Julia dared to claim that each and every person has within them a source of creativity, that it can be watered and it can bloom. How demo­cratic! How American! That art is not just for the elite, the special few struck by lightning. What she says is liberating and true. There is a hunger out there—it continues to sell at a fast pace and be absorbed into our conscience. I’ve seen it on display in the obvious places—bookstores, art museums—but I’ve also seen it for sale on the shelf of a hardware store, a grocery counter, in a pharmacy, and at a map store. This secret of creativity has seeped over into odd nooks and crannies, out of closets, into bare sight.
 
Julia Cameron is my friend. We share the love of place—one of a writer’s primary tools. We knew each other in Taos, New Mexico, where a deep source of our creativity sprung. I know her now also in Santa Fe walking her dog through the chamisa.
 
One day when we were together and I was complaining about my life’s trajectory, she turned to me with her blue eyes and soft smile and said, “I want to never stop opening up people’s lives.” And she practices what she preaches, writing plays, musicals, novels—and little known to many, bakes a terrific peach pie. She is also a deep and dedicated listener to a friend’s woes.
 
Julia continues to grow her inner life. People feel this in the book’s integrity. May The Artist’s Way continue to enlighten, march on through the transience of politics, the zigzag shifts in our human life. May it continue to be available for a long, long time. --NATALIE GOLDBERG 


INTRODUCTION TO THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF THE ARTIST’S WAY

I am seated alone in a cafe, dining solo. A woman approaches my table.
 
“Pardon me,” she says, “has anyone ever told you you re­semble Julia Cameron?”
 
Startled, I reply, “I am Julia Cameron.”
 
Now it is the woman’s turn to be surprised.
 
“Oh my God,” she exclaims, “your book changed my life. It made me a novelist.”
 
“That’s wonderful,” I tell her, genuinely pleased.
 
“I bet you hear stories like mine all the time,” the woman says.
 
“In fact, I do, but it doesn’t take away the thrill.”
 
Twenty-five years ago, I published The Artist’s Way, a book that I think of as a support kit for artists. Its popularity caught me by surprise. I thought I was writing a book for myself and a handful of friends. Instead, I wrote a book that spoke to millions. It had a central premise—we are all creative— and with the use of a few simple tools, we can all become more creative.
 
Creativity, I believed, was a spiritual practice. We had only to open ourselves up to the Great Creator working through us. We became channels for spiritual energy to enter the world. Writing, painting, dancing, acting—no matter what form our creativity took, the Great Creator caused us to flourish. And so, encounters like mine in the cafe became commonplace.
 
The sentence is always the same: “Your book changed my life.”
 
“No,” I often reply. “You changed your life. You used the tools I laid out for you.”
 
I think it is important for people to own their own spiri­tual practice. My toolkit is simple, and it invites practitioners to embrace simplicity. A recent review of my latest book noted that the tools were “simple and repetitive.” I think of this as a good thing. The tools do not change book to book. The same simple tools that worked in The Artist’s Way work still, a dozen books later.
 
In my travels, I encounter practitioners who have used the tools for years. “I’ve done Morning Pages for fifteen years,” a man recently told me. His Morning Pages—three pages of longhand, morning writing, have filled journal after journal. He doesn’t give them up, because they “work.”
 
A woman tells me the second primary tool, Artist Dates, a once a week, festive, solo expedition, have given her a life of adventure.
 
Used together, Morning Pages and Artist Dates do trans­form lives.
 
“I’ve given your book to my mother and my sister,” a woman tells me at a book signing. “It worked for all of us,” she says. “Now I want you to sign a book for my boyfriend.”
 
I ask his name, and write the simple phrase, “May our words be friends.”
 
I trust that the book will “work” for him, too. I have come to rely on the book. I trust that it is indeed life- hanging.
 
“Julia, don’t you get tired of hearing our stories?” I am asked. The answer is no. Creativity is never tiresome. It is al­ways an adventure, one I have been privileged to share.
 
“I was a very unhappy lawyer,” a Broadway actor tells me. “Then I used your tools. Now I am an actor—and a happy one.”
 
“I was what you called a ‘shadow artist,’” a thriving di­rector tells me. “I was a producer until I used your toolkit, and emerged as a director. I’ve worked with your book three times, and each time has led to a breakthrough. Thank you.”
 
“Your tools felt natural to me,” a fine arts photographer tells me. “I used to create in spurts, but your tools have given me consistent productivity.
 
“Before using The Artist’s Way, my life was very dra­matic,” a poet tells me. “I was always waiting for inspiration to strike like lightening. Now I know that my creativity is a steady flow. I write poems regularly, and without high drama. The poems I write are just as good as any I wrote before.”
 
Sentiments like these make my years of teaching worth­while. I am delighted to have been of service. I receive heart­felt letters thanking me for my work and telling me of the changes it has wrought.
 
Occasionally, the thank-yous are more public. Novelist Patricia Cornwell thanked me in the dedication of her thriller Trace. Musician Pete Townsend cited The Artist’s Way in his autobiography Who Am I. While it is thrilling to have celeb­rity endorsements, the book is perhaps at its best helping the lesser-knowns—and the help isn’t restricted to creativity is­sues.
 
“Julia, I was drunk in the outback. Now I’m sober, and a Hollywood screenwriter,” one practitioner wrote me. It is not uncommon for users of the pages to face down difficult issues such as sobriety, childhood trauma, and obesity. The pages urge honesty in facing down demons.
 
Last fall I taught in Sedona a class of ninety people. On the second night, a meeting was convened for all who felt the impact of The Artist’s Way on their well-being. Person after person cited breakthroughs to clarity and health. When it was my turn to share, I told the group that their recovery gave me great pride. I was grateful for their acknowledge­ment; grateful, too, for the many and varied strides they had taken toward mental, physical, and spiritual health.
 
“Julia,” I am sometimes asked, “aren’t you afraid you are unblocking a lot of bad art?”
 
“No,” I reply. The opposite seems to be the case. The unblocked art is often very fine, and I find myself thinking, “how could they have not known they were an artist?” And yet, many people do not know until they encounter my book.
 
Many artists have never received critical early encourage­ment. As a result, they may not know they are artists at all. Artists love other artists. Shadow artists are gravitating to their rightful tribe, but cannot yet claim their birthright. I urge them to step forward out of the shadows and into the sunlight of creativity.
 
Most of the time, when we are blocked in an area of our life, it is because we feel safer that way. The toolkit lends practitioners a sense of safety. As they learn to take small risks in their Morning Pages, they are led to larger risks. A step at a time, they emerge as artists. It has been a quarter of a century since the tools were first published. It gives me great satisfaction that the book continues to sell, and sell well. It reinforces my belief that we are all creative and have a hunger for further creativity.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARTIST'S WAY

When people ask me what I do, I usually answer, “I’m a writer-director and I teach these creativity workshops.”

The last one interests them.

“How can you teach creativity?” they want to know. Defiance fights with curiosity on their faces.

“I can’t,” I tell them. “I teach people to let themselves be creative.”

“Oh. You mean we’re all creative?” Now disbelief and hope battle it out.

“Yes.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes.”

“So what do you do?”

This book is what I do. For a decade now, I have taught a spiritual workshop aimed at freeing people’s creativity. I have taught artists and nonartists, painters and filmmakers and homemakers and lawyers—anyone interested in living more creatively through practicing an art; even more broadly, anyone interested in practicing the art of creative living. While using, teaching, and sharing tools I have found, devised, divined, and been handed, I have seen blocks dissolved and lives transformed by the simple process of engaging the Great Creator in discovering and recovering our creative powers.

“The Great Creator? That sounds like some Native American god. That sounds too Christian, too New Age, too...” Stupid? Simple-minded? Threatening? ... I know. Think of it as an exercise in open-mindedness. Just think, “Okay, Great Creator, whatever that is,” and keep reading. Allow yourself to experiment with the idea there might be a Great Creator and you might get some kind of use from it in freeing your own creativity.

Because The Artist’s Way is, in essence, a spiritual path, initiated and practiced through creativity, this book uses the word God. This may be volatile for some of you—conjuring old, unworkable, unpleasant, or simply unbelievable ideas about God as you were raised to understand “him.” Please be open-minded.

Remind yourself that to succeed in this course, no god concept is necessary. In fact, many of our commonly held god concepts get in the way. Do not allow semantics to become one more block for you.

When the word God is used in these pages, you may substitute the thought good orderly direction or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. God is useful shorthand for many of us, but so is Goddess, Mind, Universe, Source, and Higher Power.... The point is not what you name it. The point is that you try using it. For many of us, thinking of it as a form of spiritual electricity has been a very useful jumping-off place.

By the simple, scientific approach of experimentation and observation, a workable connection with the flow of good orderly direction can easily be established. It is not the intent of these pages to engage in explaining, debating, or defining that flow. You do not need to understand electricity to use it.

Do not call it God unless that is comfortable for you. There seems to be no need to name it unless that name is a useful shorthand for what you experience. Do not pretend to believe when you do not. If you remain forever an atheist, agnostic—so be it. You will still be able to experience an altered life through working with these principles.

I have worked artist-to-artist with potters, photographers, poets, screenwriters, dancers, novelists, actors, directors—and with those who knew only what they dreamed to be or who only dreamed of being somehow more creative. I have seen blocked painters paint, broken poets speak in tongues, halt and lame and maimed writers racing through final drafts. I have come to not only believe but know:

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity. One fifty-year-old student who “always wanted to write” used these tools and emerged as a prize-winning playwright. A judge used these tools to fulfill his lifelong dreams of sculpting. Not all students become full-time artists as a result of the course. In fact, many full-time artists report that they have become more creatively rounded into full-time people.

Through my own experience—and that of countless others that I have shared—I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature, that blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem. I have found this process of making spiritual contact to be both simple and straightforward.

If you are creatively blocked—and I believe all of us are to some extent—it is possible, even probable, that you can learn to create more freely through your willing use of the tools this book provides. Just as doing Hatha Yoga stretches alters consciousness when all you are doing is stretching, do­ing the exercises in this book alters consciousness when “all” you are doing is writing and playing. Do these things and a breakthrough will follow—whether you believe in it or not. Whether you call it a spiritual awakening or not. 

In short, the theory doesn’t matter as much as the prac­tice itself does. What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can op­erate. Once you agree to clearing these pathways, your cre­ativity emerges. In a sense, your creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and noth­ing that you must invent. 

MY OWN JOURNEY 

I began teaching the creativity workshops in New York. I taught them because I was told to teach them. One minute I was walking in the West Village on a cobblestone street with beautiful afternoon light. The next minute I suddenly knew that I should begin teaching people, groups of people, how to unblock. Maybe it was a wish exhaled on somebody else’s walk. Certainly Greenwich Village must contain a greater density of artists—blocked and otherwise—than nearly any­place else in America. 
 
“I need to unblock,” someone may have breathed out. 

“I know how to do it,” I may have responded, picking up the cue. My life has always included strong internal direc­tives. Marching orders, I call them. 

In any case, I suddenly knew that I did know how to un­block people and that I was meant to do so, starting then and there with the lessons I myself had learned. 

Where did the lessons come from? 

In 1978, in January, I stopped drinking. I had never thought drinking made me a writer, but now I suddenly thought not drinking mi...