As an actor desperate to dip my toe into other facets of the industry (where I might have more control), The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron had been recommended to me numerous times. For some reason the title kept putting me off.
I wasn’t an artist. I felt like I was probably meant to be one in order for the book to be applicable or useful, but I’ve always thought an actor’s job was to take the “actual artist’s” words and say them in a way that the “actual artist” director would approve of. I’m now realising that might have been where I was going wrong…
The previous version of this book had been bandied about on friends’ shelves and rehearsal rooms before. Still all I could think was: “I don’t care how good it is — that cover is heinous. And it was. Look at it. Is there anything less inspiring than a 70s mustard font and a terrifying mountain you’re already too scared to climb? (Though it should be said, my own mother pointed out the cruel irony in me belittling another artist’s work – and like all mothers everywhere, she has a point.) Regardless of where you stand on mustard mountains, in April 2020, Julia stepped her game up and gave us the vibey pool water update we didn’t know we needed.
Shortly after this, in May 2020, I finally turned the page on (as the book cover reads) “a spiritual path to a higher creativity”. Lockdown 1.0 had taken hold, and I’d just spent the past six months in a temp desk job in London – my life as an ‘artist’ was starting to look uncomfortably far from what I’d pictured. As someone lucky enough to have had parents who supported their career in the arts, initially I wondered if this book was really for me. However, given that I’d recently been commuting two hours to a job I loathed to sit behind a desk that was so hipster-chic it gave me splinters, I could definitely relate. The parts geared towards those stuck in jobs they’d been told ‘adulting’ had to look like, suddenly hit home more than I’d have liked. Whatever your background, it seems to be drummed into us from puberty: uncertain art world = bad; steady desk job= good.
For anyone not in the arts, the frustration of going to two/ three job interviews a week (if you’re lucky) and being rejected for all of them, often for years at a time, is almost unfathomable. This past year was the first time it also became unfathomable to me. What I needed in those moments of doubt was someone to guide me back to creativity and tell me how much of a waste it would be if I were to give up who I was and settle for something I’d never wanted: a stable job. But with that stable job would come control – that’s something us artists rarely have. It’s tempting, to say the least.
Then BOOM, right on cue, Julia dropped her new sexy hardback edition (complete with built-in ribbon bookmark). Before I knew it, I was waist deep in morning pages (pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning) and could feel the flow of the creative Goddess speaking her badassery through me, her willing vessel. Embarking on The Artist’s Way really does feel like a religious act.
Religion or, rather, faith has quite a large part to play in this book; something that many readers might initially find off-putting. Still, within the first few pages, Julia manages to set things straight. “God” can be whatever you want it to be, it just needs to be an acknowledgement of something outside ourselves. The original creator. They’re doing the creating. They’re just using your hands to get it on the paper. So if it’s shit, it’s their fault, not yours. And with that, I relaxed. You need to make it work for you.
“What if God’s a woman and she’s on your side?”
There are lots of tasks in the book which seem arbitrary and weird. Within days Julia had me writing lists of things I used to have when I was a kid and missed. I’m like… “ok…?”
1. Lego
2. Rollerskates
3. That toy Post Office thing where I could stamp things with a REAL stamp.
Initially, it seemed stupid. Flash forward a month and I was hitting a lot more ‘f***k-it’ buttons. All of a sudden I’m sitting on a wee wall in a women’s garden in Motherwell trying on her daughter’s old roller skates; SOLD to the 29-year-old and her quarter-life crisis. Now I’m whizzing around my living room and filled with the type of joy only eight wheels and kneepads can bring. I’m wildly bad at it, but I genuinely don’t care.
All of a sudden I start seeing art in everything. Oooh, that could be a play. That could be a painting. That could be a short film. The possibility of me being behind any of the above was baffling before, but somehow it all seemed weirdly possible now, because I wasn’t in control. Something “up there” was and they wanted me to give it a ruddy good go. And the concept of it failing? Suddenly neither here nor there – a huge shift. Don’t get me wrong, the thought of failing at another career is always just lurking there in the background, but somehow my mindset had shifted and the process, not the product, became my focus.
“Most of us hate to do something when we can obsess about something else instead. One of our favourite things to do instead of our art — is to contemplate the odds. In a creative career, thinking about the odds is a drink of emotional poison.”
Rollerskates turned into writing courses, writing courses turned into painting, painting turned into “oh my God I’ve accidentally booked a month-long trip to Norway to write a TV pilot that yesterday I didn’t know existed in my brain”.
I recognise that having the time and resources to get to Norway (two Covid tests and a quarantine later) – or wherever someone else’s version of Norway is – is something we won’t all have access to. I haven’t always been in that position myself either. But regardless of where you’re at, this book shows the importance of carving out that time any way and anywhere you can. While we may have to hold off on booking that next trip, there’s something to be said for making that corner of your room into its own creative getaway. What art could we make if we took that hour of doom-scrolling onto a blank page?
This past year has been challenging for us all, but for many, it gave us the gift of time: to regroup, to pick up that guitar, read that book, climb that mountain. Time led me to art. Art led me to Norway. I wrote that little screenplay from a desk in a friend’s cabin in Stangvik, a remote little village on the edge of a Fjord. And y’know what? I think it’s bloody good. Even if it’s not, don’t blame me. I didn’t write it. The creative Goddess up there did, I just tapped the keyboard.
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