Getting Started — There was skepticism:
Some time ago, I stumbled across a discussion on Threads about a book that was, allegedly, the miracle antidote to art block. Users were sharing their experiences with working through The Artists Way (TAW), a 12 week course that is, in author Julia Cameron’s words, a “spiritual path to higher creativity”. They were chatting excitedly about how much it changed their lives for the better. However, there was one caveat mentioned over and over again:
She sure talks a lot about God…
My Left Brain wasn’t convinced. I’m Agnostic, maybe Buddhist-curious at most and I was worried that the content would be overly preachy or biased towards a Christian world-view; Julia Cameron was raised Catholic. I admit my pre-conceived notions meant I dismissed the book at first and I mostly forgot about it until coming to Kuala Lumpur to start wrapping up our long term travel journey. We were due back in New Zealand in 3 months, and I’d reached a bit of an impasse with my creative endeavours.
I’ve been self studying analogue photography for about 18 months and have made a lot of pretty pictures; thousands of frames from our travels across 12 different countries. In this time, I’ve grown to love using vintage cameras and have collected them from the different countries I’ve visited — a Bronica ETR from Greece, a Minolta X-700 from Vietnam, a Balda Baldix from London, plus a Canonet and Olympus mju that I’d brought with me from New Zealand.
I like my photos; I think a lot of them are beautiful and serve as great mementos from our trip. Some of them I would even print and hang on the wall at home. However, the problem is just that: they’re just a bunch of pretty pictures. I want to start making photographs to communicate my ideas and feelings rather than just capturing what I see in front of me. The good, bad and ugly of it all.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with a snapshot and don’t get me started on how much of a loaded term that’s become amongst us photographers. Sometimes you simply want to take a photo of something to look back at it later and remember the moment. Sometimes you just want to hear the click of the shutter. I sure do! My Baldix has a ratcheting film wind knob and a clicky shutter that sound like ASMR heaven; it’s irresistible to use. I feel like a little kid when I play with that thing, it’s like “hehe camera make cool sound” and I can shoot a whole roll of medium format in an afternoon very easily. Sue me.
In saying that, it’s becoming increasingly important to me to develop the skill of conveying meaningful ideas visually and really crafting an image. I want to learn how to say something without saying a word. I didn’t know where to even start. I had spent so much time looking at “good” photography online and in photo-books to the point of confusion. The amount of time I was spending on social media is partly to blame here too. There was a time where I felt like I really didn’t have any unique ideas to speak of at all. My attention was always on other people’s work. My photos started looking really similar to what was popular in analogue circles online — that wasn’t good. I’m my own person dammit and want my work to reflect that.
I knew I had to put the camera down and learn to listen to my inner creative voice without worrying about good photos or social media metrics — but how? Suddenly, Right Brain came out of its hiding place and said:
hey, remember that woo-woo art book
that helped Doechii win a Grammy?
With nothing to lose but potentially everything to gain I said fuck it and bought the book and the accompanying workbook too. I approached TAW with an open mind. Maybe I was actually being a bit nosy too because the rave reviews were really hard to ignore; I wanted to know what exactly was so good about it. I was also cautious, not wanting to accidentally wind up in a cult.
Spoiler alert: Cameron does mention God a lot in TAW, but in the introduction she also says that you’re free to substitute this with something else that better aligns with your own belief system. Personally, I use “Universe” and “Good Orderly Direction” interchangeably. Nothing functionally changes about how the exercises work by making a substitution. The content is actually quite balanced and remains open to interpretation so that anyone can make use of it.
Regardless of what you or I believe, what Cameron is trying to have us do is get us in touch with the emotional side of our brain and let the logic-and-reasoning side take a back seat for a while — to once again learn to see the world through the eyes of a child, who can use their imagination freely because the roots of shame that stifle creativity haven’t had enough time to take hold. I’m glad I was wrong and gave this book a chance, because just 5 weeks in (I’m behind a week and go into this later) there has already been powerful shift in mindset and my creative output has rapidly accelerated.
These are my reflections on my first trimester in TAW:
The Essential Tools — Morning Pages and Artist Dates:
There are two essential tools that you will implement: the Morning Pages, and the Artist Date. Morning Pages are, simply put, three pages of stream of consciousness long-hand writing first thing in the morning. Cameron suggests getting up 30 minutes earlier than usual to do them. These pages are private to you and you mustn’t show them to anyone else; in fact, doing so she says, is a covert act of self sabotage. Page size isn’t specified in the book, but I use an A5 Rhodia notebook to keep my sessions between 30-45 minutes and that feels like enough for me but you might like to use larger paper instead.
An Artist Date is a solo play date that you organise for yourself at least once per week to nurture your creative spirit. I won’t write much about Artist Dates here. They were something I was already doing without having a name for them because I enjoy my own company. I’m also currently f-unemployed and have a lot of spare time so I don’t struggle to fit them in — give yourself grace if these are challenging for you, it’s okay.
The rest of the exercises are useful but optional. My week runs Sunday-Sunday, where I do my weekly check-in and read the next chapter on Sunday night before bed. All in all, I spend about 90 minutes on TAW related tasks every day. I consider a week complete if I do at least half of the optional exercises, plus the Pages and Artist Date.
In week 1, I picked up a new notebook and a nice pen to encourage myself to write. You don’t need to buy anything new if you don’t want to, though. Using the resources you already have is fine and encouraged — you’re not meant to read Morning Pages back anyway. They’re essentially a dumping ground for all of the crap floating around in your head.
In weeks 1-2, a lot of what I wrote in my Pages was very crabby, critical and doubtful. They were very, very negative. My handwriting was an illegible scrawl, I couldn’t read back what I wrote even if I wanted to. I didn’t like doing the Pages. In fact, I had what Cameron would call a tantrum and pretty much refused to read Chapter 2 of the book for almost 2 extra weeks. That’s what put me a week behind the suggested 12 week timeframe.
I continued to write Pages, but they had migrated to the end of the day and become less of a priority. I even started to miss days. This was frustrating because I could see a pattern emerging.
I’ve always been very good at coming up with excuses not to finish what I’ve set out to do. I can think of many examples where I’ve started something only to abandon it after losing momentum or when it started feeling too hard. Ask my $20k student loan where my bachelors degree is and prepare to be disappointed. Although there wasn’t really any monetary cost to abandoning TAW beyond a couple of books and a pen, the spiritual cost of breaking another promise to myself was too much to bear.
This realisation came to me during a Morning Pages session where I’d dropped my nice new pen on the ground. In doing so, the nib was damaged and the ink didn’t flow smoothly anymore. Instead of lambasting myself and giving up, I decided to keep writing. It was a small win, but persevering with a broken pen was a reminder that finishing something mildly annoying or uncomfortable was indeed possible. Maybe that also meant that finishing something even more challenging would be possible too.
After that, I got my shit together, locked back in and caught up on the required reading. I haven’t missed a day since and now write first thing in the morning before I even have my matcha. The tone in my writing has shifted to something more positive and affirming too. I’m less self critical than I was a month ago, which is a huge achievement for me as a recovering perfectionist.
Through the Pages and other exercises, I identified many limiting beliefs and realised that they weren’t even my own to begin with. They had been “gifted” to me by one person or another a long time ago. Many of those “gifts” were other people’s fears packaged as caring concern. I’m learning to be more selective with what advice I accept and from whom. Seeing these insights written out in my own handwriting gave me the permission I needed to start replacing some of those meaner beliefs with ones that are more useful and kind. I’m still actively working through this and letting the exercises take effect over time.
Week 3 Weirdness — Don’t Be Alarmed:
Let’s talk about some of the freakier observations. For instance, my dreams, which have become vivid, weird and extremely memorable — this happened almost immediately upon starting TAW. At one point I even took a pregnancy test because this was just so out of the ordinary for me and I hadn’t put two and two together yet.
In fact, for much of week 3 I felt like I was losing the plot; Mitch had to hold me through a few pity-parties and bouts of crying. We wasted 3 whole days obsessively looking at Akiyas (Japanese abandoned houses) because renovating a house in Japan instead of going home to New Zealand sounded like THE solution to us feeling directionless. The next days Pages told me this was just another form of escapism.
See, the Pages have been not so subtly hinting that I need to go back to university and study Fine Arts. If we went to Japan, I could conveniently defer doing something that was very scary for me, at least for another few years. I’ve already tried and failed to earn a Bachelors degree not once but twice. Failing a third time would be costly and embarrassing. Some of the last words Mum said to me before I went overseas were “you’re so smart, I just wish you would get an education” — of course this wasn’t said in malice, but it did bring up a lot of guilt for me because it echoed everything I had already said to myself a million times before.
This time though, the desire to study isn’t coming from a place of appeasing someone else or out of thinking it’ll land me a high paying job, but from a curiosity deep inside myself around what it would feel like to achieve it. “Veronika Mason-Dehn, Master of Fine Arts with Distinction, in Photography” has a really nice ring to it. The Pages have a funny way of revealing things that are sitting just below the surface. As ghastly as they are in the moment, I find them a very powerful tool for identifying hidden issues that might be holding me back.
The Changes Just Keep Coming:
Here’s an non-exhaustive list of other observable changes I’ve made these past 5 weeks:
- I noticed I was looking at social media at 3am when I’d use my phone as a torch during my bathroom runs. My sleep hygiene was, frankly, a bit fucked. I bought a cheap, seperate alarm clock and now my phone lives in a cabinet in the lounge at night. I also try not to look at it until after I’ve done MP’s. Sleep is better than it was a month ago.
- Before starting TAW I knew I wasn’t getting enough exercise, so I decided to try Pilates. The course has kept me motivated and I make sure to go 2-3 times per week. The Life Pie exercise in weeks 2 and 4 are very useful for visualising areas of your life that might be lacking.
- I decided to start reading consistently again. Currently I’m bashing through Sontag’s “On Photography”. I think reading more will help me be a better writer.
- After completing a week 3 exercise describing my childhood bedroom which inspired me to write a poem, I realised I quite liked writing poetry and now write something almost every day.
- Reintroduced at a minimum 20 minutes of daily meditation.
- I’ve been really productive — writing, drawing, folding countless pieces of origami and finally finishing my website.
- I managed to slash my screen-time from an average 11-9hrs down to barely an hour during week 4’s Media Deprivation challenge.
Yes, the course demands a week of media depravation. Since TAW was first published in the 90’s when reading was the primary mode of entertainment and information sharing, Cameron calls this tool Reading Deprivation but many people online take a modern approach and revoke access to all distracting media — no YouTube, Netflix, social media apps etcetera. Hopefully you get the gist. The idea is to spend some time away from other people’s ideas so that your own ideas can shine through. To keep this blog a manageable length, I’ll write about my experience with media deprivation in a seperate post. You can subscribe to my newsletter to be notified when this is published — click the link in the bottom banner at the end of this article to be directed to the sign up page.
Synchronicities:
Before I wrap up, I’d like to make a brief mention of synchronicities, which you’re tasked with looking out for from week 3 onwards.
I thought I didn’t experience any, but that actually isn’t true. My Uncle Yuri passed away in 2014. He was in the middle of completing a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Bern. Yuri was a prolific writer and spoke many languages, he loved to write poetry and has a book published under the pseudonym Showpanorama. Unfortunately I can’t find reference to his work online anywhere. It was likely never widely advertised and the only copy of his book that I know of is with Mum. If I can find a picture of it, I’ll add it somewhere here at a later date. His dates were my first tattoo and I carry a piece of him with me wherever I go.
This week, I’ve been writing non-stop. It’s like someone turned a faucet on in my head and broke off the handle. Words are just pouring out of me. Maybe my Uncle has something to do with that. I like the connection I feel to him when I’m writing so I plan to continue and see where it all takes me.
The past 5 weeks has been fascinating. I wasn’t expecting this to work so quickly. I certainly feel more creative, open and productive so I’m looking towards the next 8 weeks with curiosity and optimism. My little photography hiatus has been refreshing but I’m also excited to pick up the camera again next week so I can start directing this new found creative energy towards the thing I love the most: making pictures. If you’ve happened to start TAW because of this article, I’d love to hear from you. You can send me a message via my contact form. I’ll return in about 4 weeks to give you another update.