The Artist's Way

I picked up a book in a charity shop a few weeks ago called The Artist's Way. It's a course supposed to enhance creativity. The author, Julia Cameron, says that creativity is a skill that can be learnt and sets out exercises to do it.
I thought the book was about art, but it is more writing based, although she says the course is applicable to any creative work.

It mainly consists of "the daily pages", three pages of longhand writing that you write out first thing every morning. You can write anything you want, but the important thing is doing it consistently. Then there are "artist dates" - where the idea is to make an excursion by yourself in order to enhance your creativity. It could be all sorts of things - country walk, visit to a junk shop, and so on. I think the idea is to do it by yourself and to step out of your normal routine.

I've been doing it for three weeks. I've faithfully completed the pages every day. I've managed to do one "artist date", which was very rewarding. You're supposed to write some kind of assessment at the end of every week. I haven't done that yet.

I do find it a bit of a problem when the book talks of writing "affirmations". She suggests writing things like "I am a talented and prolific artist". Um... but I'm not.

She makes the point that we are much better at putting ourselves down than we are at praising ourselves, so I might try and work out a way round that. Try and think more positively in my own way.



Anyway, if you're interested here's the link - The Artist's Way

You can buy the book here, or pick it up elsewhere on the internet for a few quid.


Postscript: June 14th. I'm certainly doing more creative things now. How much of that is down to doing these exercises, I don't know; but it must have helped a bit.