The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron’s 1995 book The Artist’s Way appears frequently on lists of best books for writers and other creative types. I put it on my own TBR list while doing my year of craft reading, but it got pushed off by other books more directly focused on writing.

I picked it up in the summer of 2020, when I was feeling marooned by the pandemic and wanted to recommit to my own creative project. I made it through perhaps the first chapter or two of the book. Within days, my Morning Pages had veered off from Cameron’s instructions and had become freewriting for my novel. I kept this up fairly regularly until the stress of an overscheduled September, including two kids still doing virtual school from home, brought me to a halt.

When The Ruby, a creative community here in San Francisco, announced a twelve-week group program focused on The Artist’s Way, I signed up—along with, remarkably, almost sixty other women and nonbinary folks. Our first meeting was on January 5, the evening before the capitol insurrection, and it is no exaggeration to say that our weekly meetings, and the work surrounding them, were key to my mental health in the dark days of that January and February, when I was struggling not only with the tumultuous events in Washington, but also surging Covid cases and a pretty significant case of burnout.

The Artist’s Way itself I once again found frustrating on many levels. As one member of our group perceptively noted at an early meeting, the book is steeped in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, much of which is religious in a vague sort of way. I have, let’s say, a complicated relationship to AA-speak and find it off-putting, but this won’t be the case with all readers.

The book also betrays its age and Cameron’s own blind spots in some of its references (ideas for Artist Dates, for example, include “a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds”). The readers Cameron envisions are white and often wealthy, like “Edwin, a miserable millionaire trader whose joy in life comes from his art collection.”

Cameron’s artists are also blocked, and this is a key point of my review: The Artist’s Way is best suited to creatives who either haven’t been able to get traction with their writing or other creative practice, or are combatting some kind of block to their practice. If you are already regularly writing, painting, or dancing, you aren’t going to profit much from this book. Instead, go read an advanced book in your discipline that will teach you something new. (My recommendations for writers are available to download at the bottom of this post.)

A running metaphor for Cameron is that your artist is a child and must be treated as such—gently nurtured and protected from possible harm. I fought against this metaphor until almost the end of the twelve weeks, declaring in one meeting that at the very least I wanted my inner artist to be a tween. But I came to appreciate Cameron’s point by the end of the program. Her metaphor resists the dominant narrative of linear growth and progress. No matter how many projects you finish or how successful you are, your inner artist will occasionally throw a tantrum or even regress. This is natural and calls for patience and a change in tactics rather than despair.

Cameron’s child metaphor, along with the Artist Date and Morning Pages practices, encourages artists to focus their gaze on their core self because that is, ultimately, the generative source of art. As she notes late in the book, “If the demand to be original still troubles you, remember this: each of us is our own country, an interesting place to visit. It is the accurate mapping out of our own creative interests that invites the term original. We are the origin of our art, its homeland. Viewed this way, originality is the process of remaining true to ourselves.”

Read straight through, The Artist’s Way is an often infuriating amalgam of lightweight spiritual bromides (“God knows that the sky’s the limit”) and useful insights about the creative process (“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.”). The book is frequently repetitive, often hectoring and prescriptive in tone.

And yet the process works. The basic containers of the weekly Artist’s Date and daily Morning Pages are infinitely adaptable, and they are almost guaranteed to lead to creative growth. Some of her suggested tasks, like a week of reading deprivation, are revelatory. Similarly, the process of going through the book with a group, week by week over the course of three months, will give you creative companionship and a reason to keep going with the material.

If you want to write and don’t know how to begin—or are stalled out and need help beginning again—assembling a small group to work through The Artist’s Way (or April Dávila’s Sit. Write. Here., which I think is even better) over the course of a few months will almost certainly be helpful. Your group might then evolve into a critique group or beta reading group. Or you might keep reading and discussing creativity or craft books. An excellent follow-up would be Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, which has a very different tone (blunt, practical) and orientation (physical and performance art).

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