The Artist's Way: Week 8

   

This week we're thinking about time. Hooray!, I thought. Time management is second only to money in my list of things I like to obsess over to pretend I have control over my life. 

Handling artistic loss

To my confusion, Julia Cameron starts off the chapter writing about artistic loss instead. From commercial failure (my book was a flop) to criticism (I got a low grade in art school), such losses are simply part of an artist's life. So we must develop the ability to handle losses well.

The most obvious antidote to artistic loss is encouragement. I can vouch for this. I didn't get any encouragement in either of my tertiary educations, so I just assumed I was bad in both design (in poly) and humanities (uni). Likewise with my first internship (video production) and first full-time job (book buying).

When I went into my first publishing job, I got praise and encouragement for the first time ever. This changed everything, of course, and writing became my "passion". So much so that I worked overtime almost every day, for very little pay, but that's another story.

Truth be told, any one of the things I did before could've been my passion... if only I had tried them in more encouraging environments. Looking back, it wasn't that I was better at writing than at any of the other things. I just happened to join a workplace with a US-driven culture, where people weren't shy about saying nice things.

That was 9 years ago. Now I'm trying something new, something I've never gotten praised for, and it's scary. I fear my first criticism, first hater, first rejection.

Move on: fill the form

In Julia Cameron's early days, her scripts were rejected many times. How did she deal with those losses? It would've been so tempting to wallow in self-pity and "I'll never make it"s. But instead of "why me?" she asked, "how?"

She decided to raise her own funds and make her own independent movie with one of her rejected scripts. Her debut feature film was born from artistic losses.

Healthy artists need to develop the habit of asking "how?" or "what next?" in response to artistic loss. And the answer is almost always an action. "There is always one action you can take for your creativity daily. This daily action commitment fills the form," she writes.

Examples of small, daily, fill-the-form actions include washing your paintbrushes, buying some clay, checking the papers for acting classes. 

I decided to make filling the form easier by getting a dedicated exercise book specifically for my book. I write a little in each every day. The writing may be shitty or stilted or boring at times, but as long as I write in it, I am filling the form. 

Anxiety addiction

As an exercise, Cameron invites us to notice how often we entertain anxious thoughts when it is time for us to put in our work. 

"You will pick up an anxious thought, almost like a joint, to blow off — or at least delay — your next creative action." Many creative people, Cameron writes, have an "addiction to anxiety in lieu of action". "We prefer the low-grade pain of anxiety to the drudgery of small and simple daily steps in the right direction."

Sometimes this manifests as a sudden need to do housework; other times it's self-created "negative drama" where we fantasise/agonise over massive life changes. Like having to uproot and move to New York City to rub shoulders with book publishers, or divorcing your spouse so you can have time to pursue your acting career.

Oh my god, this was scary. I am constantly doing this. I lose myself in fantasies of "the perfect life" where I can either make loads of money doing very little, or I spend nothing and live on air and I can just write. I also like to think up reasons to dismiss my book ideas (not marketable, interesting, original, etc.). What a waste of time and energy.

"Filling the form," Cameron writes, "means that we must work with what we have rather than languish in complaints over what we have not."

Week 8 check-in

Morning pages: ??? I wrote every day, but I've been sleeping and waking up late recently so some of my pages were either incomplete or mentally scattered. On the other hand, I have been writing in my "book notebook" in the mornings so maybe that's a win.

Artist date: I had an unplanned one on Friday. It was my day off, and I planned to buy myself a notebook at Popular then do some Deliveroo. While at Popular, I started reading YA novels and then I decided not to Roo. Instead, after buying my notebook, I went to the library (which was empty) and sprawled on the couch with a big stack of books. I read trash in the sun and I loved it.

Issues this week: Physically, I don't feel so great. I did a lot of housework (honestly, don't know why I bother) on Monday. And on Wednesday I kinda triggered my old lower back injury carrying heavy cartons of books at work. My back still feels quite shit.