About eight months ago I started a twelve-week course called the Artist’s Way. You might be familiar; I learned that far more people than I would have thought knew about it or had tried it in some part. A pandemic resurgence in at-home creativity? Or just the enduring popularity of a self-help book that’s been around since 1992?
Anyway, the Artist’s Way is a 12-week course where each week has a chapter’s worth of reading and thought exercises, plus the course’s two recurring tasks: writing three stream-of-consciousness pages every day (morning pages) and taking yourself on a weekly “artist’s date.” I started the course in February, and “completed” it this past August, so suffice to say it did not take me 12 weeks. I also put “completed” in quotations because I skipped out on nearly all of my artist dates, only did a handful of the exercises each week, and had such a yo-yo diet relationship with my morning pages that I started stretching each week of the course into three or four in the hopes that I would finally “get in my groove.”
At a certain point, I forced myself to move on to the next chapter, and finally, to call the course “done.”
The yo-yo diet and misplaced hope of “finding my groove” was a familiar part of my creative process. Since I began working part-time to try and complete my novel, I’ve had weeks of scant writing output and weeks of no output at all, all while holding onto this dream that my writing days (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) would be productive 8-hour workdays akin to my “real” work days, except instead of writing code for a random tech company I would be writing chapters of my book.
It hasn’t worked out that way. And looking back at my morning pages, I found a lot of rumination on that failure, both with my book and with the Artist’s Way course itself. I wasn’t sure I was getting out of it what I was meant to, the promised “creative recovery”. How was it helping my writing to be constantly berating myself? Was this new ebb-and-flow cycle—forgetting morning pages, skipping artist’s dates, falling out the habit for a day or a week when life got too busy—having any positive impact? If I couldn’t “do it right” should I even bother doing it at all?
Now that I’ve finished the course, I’ve been trying to reexamine that lens and see if there isn’t a more optimistic takeaway. I did get something out of doing the Artist’s Way; a few things in fact.
For one, although I didn’t do my morning pages every day, I filled up 3+ journals worth of pages over the past year and have still been doing them a few days a week. So, I developed a journaling habit that has actually stuck. And that journaling has been good for my mental health. Even if it hasn’t often stimulated my creativity, it’s been doing the mental flossing that keeps my mind clearer for the times when I am writing. A few times it even birthed some good ideas.
But the biggest shift I’ve noticed was a shift in my attitude on producing “good” writing.
One of the first concepts the Artist’s Way reflects on is your inner censor, the critical voice that tells you that whatever you’ve written is amateurish or incorrect or not gonna cut it, and effectively shuts you up from going any further. This was familiar—the more years of writing I had under my belt, the slower my progress became, the more I agonized over every sentence. For my novel-in-progress the stakes were particularly high: this was the book that could get me a publishing deal, could catapult me from hobbyist to real writer, if I pulled it off. I already knew I was paralyzed by my inner censor. So when I read that chapter it didn’t register as more than just validating— oof, yeah, that’s brutally relatable.
But the more the course emphasized just doing (again, a concept I was familiar with—you don’t become better at anything without miles on the treads, you don’t produce a whole book without powering through the block every day), the more I found myself actually practicing it. I wrote a short story in the span of a few days. A feat, given my track record of one chapter every two-ish months. The words just flowed, because I didn’t stop myself to care if the story was going to be good, and by the time I finished, my assessment was that it was. I did more paintings, turning the page as soon as the sketch began to feel overworked. I did my morning pages. And I had a little more fun with my novel writing. I began to dread getting into the manuscript a bit less. I had some good days, when the ebb-and-flow leaned more flow.
I started letting myself be proud of whatever progress I did make, not in the “everyone gets a trophy for participating” kind of way, but in the “look here’s another example of me doing” kind of way. I started treating all creative efforts—the act of writing this blog post, for example—as coins in the bank worth validating an identity as a creator (whatever that means), worth considering as “real” work. It’s actually less work to create something than nothing. A lot of the time creating a whole lot of nothing is the most draining thing of all. I think I’ve told myself this a lot of times, but for the first time I started internalizing it more often than not.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “beginner’s mind” from Zen Buddhism, the act of having an openess to whatever comes, like a beginner would, and not being stifled with judgment and expectation. Popularized in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki says “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” I read that book a long time ago, and didn’t keep up with its wisdom. I’m trying a little harder to bring beginner’s mind back to my writing. I think the biggest thing I got from the Artist’s Way is remembering the importance of it.
So did I overcome the yo-yo diet? Nope. Not for the Artist’s Way, and not for pretty much every other project in my life. But I do feel a little more at peace with the ebbs and flows, and keeping the pressure off is making the flows more frequent. I may never be a writer who cranks through a thousand words each writing day and can get a novel drafted in a year. But I do think I will finish this novel, and getting down into my pages has lately felt like much less like tying myself to the whipping post.
And who knows, maybe I’ll try doing the course again. Do a few more of the exercises, take myself on a few more artist’s dates. See what comes out of an actual 12 weeks. I didn’t get the explosion of creative throughput I was hoping for, but I put on a bit more muscle for the months ahead. Even with this post, which could probably use more editing, I’m saying fuck it and hitting the publish button. Because something is better than nothing.
' in the “look here’s another example of me doing” kind of way. '
Yes!!
Also I love that watercolour piece