The Artist's Way: Week 9

    

Julia Cameron: We call ourselves "lazy" when we're unable to create. 

Me: Fuck yeah. I have been especially "lazy" lately. I had a good few days of writing, and then all of a sudden, my brain just won't start anymore.

Julia Cameron: But maybe it's really fear that prevents us from starting, you know?

Me: It doesn't feel like fear. Undisciplined, is how I feel.

Julia Cameron: Some people think being an artist requires serious discipline. Military precision. Waking up at the crack of dawn. Saluting the desk.

Me: That's me for about 5 minutes, and then I burn out.

Julia Cameron: But over the long term, it's not duty but enthusiasm that keeps us going. It's joy. It's a sense of play. It's a 6am playdate with yourself to goof around while no one else is up.

Creative U-turns

Often, according to Julia Cameron, we'll get somewhere with our work — a breakthrough, a great work session, some feedback, a request for follow-up — and then abruptly quit the project for no apparent reason. Yep, it's the dreaded Creative U-Turn.

The reason, says she, is that we're afraid of what's next. Success, failure? We don't know. Our inner artists are skittish young colts, jumpy things.

Oh boy. I have U-turned so many times from my book, I have lost count. I'll write with fervour for two days, then all of a sudden, I'd be like, "what's the point of all this slogging? Let's just read some more Colleen Hoover instead." And then I stall.

Or I write, and I come across another article about, say, how to beat inflation with the right credit card. And I'm like, "fuck this horseshit!" I don't want to be associated with that kind of content.

To move through a U-Turn, says Cameron, we need to reach out to older and wiser horses. We need to put our egos aside and ask for help — get advice from those who've gone through the same. ("How did you continue to write your book and not hate yourself?")

There is also an exercise in the book to help name and thus exorcise the demons that haunt a specific project. After doing it, I realised I harbour a lot of anger at certain writers in the field, who have polluted the stream with their mediocrity. But I fear that nobody will prefer my work to theirs.

Yet... what do I stand to gain by continuing to stall? Fucking nothing! I'd just be frittering my time on activities that don't add up to an achievement.

Rereading morning pages

One of the exercises this week is to reread the morning pages from Weeks 1 to 8. 

I pulled out my old notebook and it made me smile, how enthusiastic I was in the beginning. In the first few weeks my pages were filled with AMAZING INSIGHTS! Plus descriptions of the trees in the park and drawings of bunny butts.

Weeks 5 to 7, I had a lot to write about because that was Singapore Writers Festival season. 

From Week 8 onwards, my pages went flat. I slipped back into pre-morning pages habits, i.e., merely recapping the previous day and trying to weasel out of the chore. Tired? Overstimulated? Overwhelmed? 

I made a note of the consistent preoccupations throughout the past 2 months:

• The Book (which keeps morphing, WTF)
• complaining about my hectic pace of life
• the animal wars (rabbit conflicts, mostly)
• curveballs: my grandma & my friend
• the anxiety of freelance writing

But I have also enjoyed modest successes in the past weeks:

• shifting wake-up time from 10am to 9am
• opting out of certain unhealthy friendships
• simplifying my life by cutting out some things entirely (e.g. food rescue; non-yoga exercise)
• cooking quite a lot
• writing morning pages pretty much everyday except the one day I was sick

Week 9 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 dropped the ball on this one. But my happiest day this week was the day we sat at McDonald's Bishan Park and there was a downpour. There's something so delicious about sitting snug in a sheltered place while it's pouring. I mean my hot McFluffy helped, too. I didn't get that much writing done, but I read half of Emily Henry's Book Lovers lol.

Issues this week: Plenty. I cried a lot.