Julia Cameron Interview
Posted by vrleavittFeb 2
Julia Cameron is the author of, “The Artist’s Way.” The book/program is supposed to help unblock the blocked and discover the undiscovered artist in each of us. It may sound a little woo-woo for some people, but oh well.
I’ve started and stopped this program about twice now. However, I have restarted it and am determined to finish this time, as I discussed in an earlier blog post. So far, so good. I know I will finish it this time. I expect you to yell at me if I don’t. We can yell at me together. It’ll be fun.
Anyway, below is an interview with Julia Cameron, primarily about “The Morning Pages.” (In other clips linked on the page, she discusses other aspects of The Artist’s Way as well.) The Morning Pages are one of the key stepping stones in The Artist’s Way path. Seriously, when I first started the course, I thought they were pointless. I’ve always resisted free writing. I’m more of a stare out the window till inspiration hits, incubate the ideas for a while and have them pretty much solid before I ever commit them to paper or screen. Staring at a blank page freaks me out and tends to scare away my already flighty muse. I arrive at the blank page armed with ideas, but that’s not the point of the morning pages.
Last week though, I had a breakthrough. I’d been doing the morning pages, but filling them with ho-hum journal-ish type things like how I wish I had a cup of coffee, and, oh dear god why won’t the cat make me a cup of coffee, or if I could just use the force to make myself a cup of coffee I’d be so happy. You get the point.
However, last week I actually wrote a piece of fiction. Not a story really, but a little slice of time. Just a page long, more of a descriptive piece than anything, but there it was. It came from nowhere. I hadn’t tossed it around beforehand, I hadn’t developed a mental sketch of anything. I just sat down and wrote, and it was great. Can’t wait to see how the rest of this journey unfolds.
Click here to see Julia Cameron on The Artist’s Way.
7 comments
Comment by Jean on February 2, 2010 at 11:29 am
Cats…gotta love ‘em cause they don’t care if you hate ‘em.
Comment by Wolf Althuis on February 2, 2010 at 12:05 pm
I understand wanting to attack the blank page fully armed. I hadn’t heard of Julia before but will definately look at that video. Thanks
Comment by JoElle on February 2, 2010 at 12:35 pm
I will check out that interview! (I can’t right now, my mobile internet doesn’t have a strong enough signal to play it)
If you ever saw that movie “Finding Forrester” it really seemed to promote that ‘just sit down and write’ thinking. Which reminds me of the idea behind NaNo.
I think ‘just writing’ DOES work. It’s sort of magical thing, it is as if once the hands start forming words by punching keys (or forming words from pen to paper) … it starts a creative process that moves forward almost with a life of its own.
Comment by --gg on February 3, 2010 at 9:32 am
…I’ve always found that ‘assignments’ aided a person to begin writing. There are sites that will tell you to write 500 or whatever on the topic of ‘X’ Yes, it may mean some research on the topic assigned, but there’s some research in any book novel, isn’t there?
Comment by Karen Laskowsky on February 3, 2010 at 12:53 pm
When I took the CWG apprentice course, I had a love-hate relationship with assignments. Most of the time they fueled me for writing. But there were a few that put the block in my way. (There was one scenario that was so absurd I just couldn’t write my way out of it to meet the requirements of the assignment.) That was a bad couple of weeks.
Comment by vrleavitt on February 3, 2010 at 3:16 pm
JoElle…I haven’t seen that movie, but I’ll have to check it out! I’ve heard of it and all, I just don’t get to the movies or the video store that matter, like I used to. LOL
Garry…absolutely!
Karen…I remember when you were doing that course and some of the struggles you had. So far, I’m liking Artist’s Way a lot. We’ll see how things go as it progresses.
Comment by Susan on February 4, 2010 at 8:28 pm
Vanessa, so glad this is working out for you! I’m sure you got my email that I wasn’t going to be able to committ to reading the book yet because of so many other things. It sounds wonderful though, and I will return to it (like you have before!) at some point. I remember in my creative writing class doing a similar exercise like morning pages, it was great. What also helps are not necessarily “assignments” but weekly prompts like I do at the art websites. You can choose to do them or not, but it does get the juices flowing. Anther great exercise I do in writing is take a photo and make a story out of it, that’s a lot of fun. Good luck on your journey, it sounds like your off to a great start!