Book Review: The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron 5/5 star rating
Although now 30 years old, this book is timeless and well worth a read (or several). The book entails a 12-week program designed to help you discover your inner artist of whatever ilk. The book will have you writing three pages of longhand writing each morning, but this is NOT a book exclusively for writers. This guide is for any type of artist you may be—dancer, singer, sculptor, script writer, painter, photographer—whatever. After discovering, or recovering, your inner artist, the book also provides guidance that will help nurture and guide it. Specifically, the book presents play and creativity as spiritual processes. But don’t worry, the book is well-suited to whatever concept you have of spirituality and even of God. Cameron presents her material in a framework that does not judge or preach, it merely offers a path and a concept that will work for everyone.
The book consists of a 12-week course covering the introductory material and 12 main chapters. Each chapter is intended to be covered over the course of a week’s time. Cameron provides the example of reading the chapter on Sundays while working on the tasks throughout the week. Ideally then, you would complete your weekly check-in on Saturdays. The book follows an easy pace and the tasks are meant to reinforce the readings and help you apply the concepts. Readings are fairly short but packed with information. I am on my second reading of the book currently and feel I am getting even more out of it on this time around.
Each lesson is taught with a combination explanation, illustrating story, and suggestions for applying the concept. Cameron’s style is conversational and welcoming. She combines interesting anecdotes that illustrate the points she makes while also offering guidance to the reader. Each concept comes easily but powerfully through her stories and obvious years of teaching. The reader greatly benefits from the trial and error that Cameron has done before distilling the concepts into this book.
Weekly tasks and check-ins reinforce the chapter’s material. Weekly tasks are designed to address a variety of learning styles and applications of the material. For example, some tasks may include taking a brisk 20-minute walk while others ask you to write out responses to questions. At times the questions give your inner artist and chance to speak to their desires and dreams while other times the questions help you directly think through that week’s readings. There may seem at first blush to be a lot of tasks for each week, but as Cameron suggests, you may not respond to all of them each week. However, taken a few at a time over the week, the tasks are easy to accomplish. Each week ends with the same four questions for the weekly check-in. Because the book begins with a personal contract with yourself to undertake the work, the check-in lets you gauge whether you’ve kept that commitment each week.
The “magic” of this book is in the daily morning pages and weekly artist dates. Throughout the 12 weeks of the book’s program, readers are asked to commit to writing three long-hand pages daily. The purpose of the morning pages is to empty your mind of all the clutter that takes up valuable creative energy. There is no right or wrong to morning pages, the reader simply rolls out of bed and spills stream-of-consciousness into their journal. Along the way there will be affirmations to add to the process as well. Additionally, once per week, readers are asked to commit to taking their inner artist on a solo date to do something fun. This is a process of “filling the well” as Cameron puts it. Activities might include a couple hours in a hobby store getting inspiration for projects, going to a museum or gallery, a trip to the local coffee shop to people watch, or any number of things that might provide inspiration. Important to the artist dates is that you do them without allowing others to join you—this is time to spend solely with your inner artist. Between the morning pages and artist dates true magic happens. The reader will begin to notice synchronicities in life and gain clarity in goals and desires.
In short, I highly recommend this book and Julia Cameron’s 12-week program to awaken your inner artist. The book is a timeless and easy process for discovering or recovering creativity in your life. I give the book, even 30 years later, 5 out of 5 stars.
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