The Artist's Way: Week 7

  

I came perilously close to burnout this week. Between starting my new part-time job, visiting my friend in the hospice, and some mandatory family meals, I almost forgot all about The Artist's Way. Certainly I didn't do an artist's date (again) (until today, that is).

I considered postponing my Week 7 by a week. Then I looked in my notebook and realised that I have been writing all week. Quite a lot, in fact. It seems my creative life has gone on despite the time crunch. Huh.

So, here we are. Let's start the second half of The Artist's Way.

Receptive & active skills

While the 6 weeks of The Artist's Way laid the psychological groundwork for the recovering artist — working on the right mindset, say — in week 7 we start moving towards cultivating the appropriate skills. They are:

The skill of listening: Rather than wait for inspiration to strike like a bolt from the blue, we must learn to tune in to artistic intuition as though it were a radio channel. It's about picking up the subtle cues and turning the knob to get to the right frequency.

The skill of ignoring perfectionism: "Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead," write Cameron. It causes you to get mired in insignificant details so you can never complete your work. It's a form of self-sabotage, because it provides so much fodder for self-criticism ("nothing I write is any good"). We must learn therefore to ignore perfectionism.

The skill of doing things badly: The opposite of perfectionism is the willingness to try things out and be okay with sucking at them. Sitting with embarrassment, laughing at ourselves, enjoying not being good at something — these are skills we can only cultivate through action. "Once we are willing to accept [doing things badly] our options widen," writes the sensei. 

The skill of analysing jealousy: Jealousy, envy, even person-directed angst can illuminate possible paths of action. The green feelings come up when we notice someone like us who's doing something we wish we could do. Often, jealousy is a mask for the fear of doing something, notes Cameron. The relevant skill here is to study your jealousy "map" and identify action points that you can take.

Week 7 check-in

Morning pages: 7/7. This week I found myself writing Actual Things (outlines, drafts, brainstorming) in my morning pages. This is in marked contrast to the beginning of the course, when I wrote everything that happened in the past 24 hours and then tried to think of things to fill up the rest of the pages. 

Artist date: After not having much time at all to myself all week and getting all explode-y, I did something nice for me today. I went for yin yoga then spent most of the afternoon sitting at the Singapore River, just loafing and doing nothing. Okay maybe I also wrote some bad poetry, just for fun. It. Was. Wonderful.

Issues this week: Not exactly an issue, but I recently realised that I am not so much an "artist" as a "conscious consumer". That is why I love seemingly shallow topics, such as hilarious/ironic condominium hoarding copy, the visual conventions of YouTube ads, the trend of trashy web novels from China, and the understated superiority of Long John Silver's over all its fast food competitors. (I could probably shit out a blog post about the major fast food chains in Singapore, their salient qualities, and what sort of people go to which.)