Blocked Artists And The Lies We Believe
What doing The Artists Way for the second time helped me finally see
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I have a lot of writer friends, and many of them swear by Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. I had read it years ago and loved it, but I didn't treat it as the twelve-week course that it is carefully designed to be.
The only exercise I engaged in was the famed "Morning Pages," which requires you to write, stream of consciousness, in your journal first thing in the morning until you have filled three pages.
I didn't see any major shifts in my life after reading the book and doing Morning Pages, unlike so many friends who had major breakthroughs from doing this work.
I found this annoying, but not enough to make me to look more deeply into it.
Then, last year, a close friend of mine who is a writer signed up to do The Artists Way as part of a group and followed the course to the letter. He went on the "artists dates"—weekly outings by yourself to engage in creative endeavors—that I had tuned out and he answered the journal prompts at the end of each chapter.
What I watched happen through this process was a person actually change. He became less anxious. He felt more creative. He wasn't worrying as much about the future or what his next creative project would be and was trusting God/The Universe or what Julia tends to call "The Great Creator" to provide for him. He had felt blocked as a writer when he started the course, but he now felt more flow.
He was different.
I didn't have writer's block, but I knew that I had to have other blocks that I couldn't see, and I wanted to find out what they were. My friend had inspired me to give The Artist Way another run, but this time, I would do it by the book. I wouldn't skip over the exercises. I would go through the process as it was designed and see what happened.
Imagine my surprise when, about halfway through the course, I realized I was what Julia calls a ‘blocked artist.”
What I learned is too much to chronicle in its entirety, but I will highlight a few insights that shifted how I think and live and had an enormous impact on my creativity and where I’m putting my energy these days.
You have to fill the well.
Often, we try to draw from our creative well without bothering to fill it up. Or we fill it but fail to replenish it after it has been drained. Then, we are surprised when we go to do our work and find ourselves scraping the bottom of the well and coming up empty.
In order to maintain our well-being and keep our well full, we have to engage in creative activities. Julia calls these “artists dates,” which for me meant visiting museums, taking a drawing class, and going to a "paint and sip," where I painted an owl that looked suspiciously like my dog Lucy. I also started spending more time knitting and walking in nature.
What I learned is that these kinds of activities are not luxuries; they are necessities. Filling the well should be fun. It’s a delight, not a duty, says Julia. There are no “shoulds” here.
Do what lights you up.
Within weeks of starting this new way of living, along with doing my three pages of journaling each morning, my creativity began to blossom in my work. These creative activities also fed me personally and I felt happier and more fulfilled.
Reading too much can be a block.
Wait, what?
In one of the exercises, Julia has you finish the sentence, "My favorite block is…." and then she lists out some examples. One was "reading too much." (I'm doing this from memory, so it may have said "reading," but I can't be sure.)
I was shocked. How could reading be a block?
When I journaled about it I realized almost immediately how I used my constant reading of nonfiction as a way to numb out. I also realized that instead of filling my well at the end of the day by spending time drawing, knitting, playing with my dog, or talking to another human, for example, I usually went straight to reading a nonfiction book where I could learn something.
My poor brain was never getting a break. I was addicted to information—I always needed to know more and be more informed, which I came to see as the block of perfectionism. I also was spending too much time reading other people's ideas and not making enough room for my own ideas to germinate.
Pay close attention to the negative beliefs you have about leading a creative life or operating outside the box.
The conditioned beliefs we have about creative careers are almost always blocks. Midway through the course, the friend who had inspired me to tackle this project was visiting. I told him that I had realized that I was a blocked artist and that I really just wanted to be a writer, not a coach, as I had previously thought. (Coaching would still play a part of my life, but prior to doing this course, I thought it would be my dominant activity.)
"But it's very hard to make a living as a writer," I told him ominously. I said it almost as if in a trance. He called me out on it, noting that my husband has been making a living as a writer for 40 years, as have many of my friends. "You are saying only other people can make a living as writers, just not you."
He was right. It was time to let go of that belief.
Academia can kill creative dreams.
Most of us picked up our beliefs about creative life from our families.
My parents were academics, and Julia notes that academics can often have a scholarly appreciation of art but are much more interested in intellectual discourse than the messy uncertainty of the creative life. She notes that, "academia harbors a far more subtle and deadly foe to the creative spirit" than direct criticism. "Outright hostility, after all, can be encountered. Far more dangerous, far more soul chilling is the subtle discounting of one's art."
Through doing the journal exercises she assigned, I came to realize that this was exactly what I had encountered as a creative child. When I showed my parents my drawings, short stories, or pottery, they would barely look over. It didn't matter that my teacher had chosen my story to read to the class because she was so impressed or that my pottery project was featured in one of the glass cases at my junior high.
They weren't cruel or critical; they just weren't interested. The message was clear to me: what you are doing is not important. Ironically, what they wanted me to be doing was reading all the time, the way they did, something that didn't interest me as a child but became an obsession as an adult. Until I journaled about this topic, I had never made the connection between my parent's academic careers and their indifference to what they saw as not serious.
These exercises are not meant to demonize parents but to unearth the core beliefs driving our lives. Julia also speaks to the corrosive criticism that art students at academic institutions can receive and how it can kill their creative spirits as they develop as artists.
We usually aren't totally conscious of how these experiences shaped us, and it can cause us to not just miss out on doing things we love but can even lead us to self-sabotage when we finally start moving in the direction of our creative callings.
Watch out for ‘blocked artist’ careers.
Julia points to the people who make their livelihoods by supporting or tearing down creatives as ‘blocked artists.’ Think of literary or TV agents, PR executives, or professional critics. If you are working in a job making other artists successful, then you might be harboring a secret desire to be a novelist, painter, or some other kind of creative. Alternatively, if you spend your life critiquing Broadway shows, books, or television series, you might want to be an actor or writer. Or if you find yourself spending a lot of time online leaving critical comments, you are almost definitely blocked in some area of your life.
This is just one of many reasons that we should all learn to ignore critics, who are unavoidable once you put your work into the world. They are almost always blocked artists projecting their issues onto you. An honest critique will be helpful, whereas a critic nastily lashing out is not providing useful information.
In hindsight, I could see how working as a political analyst on TV had been my blocked artist career. I believed that I couldn't make a living as a writer and had to do a job I grew to hate to pay the bills and fund what I used to call my "writing habit," of column writing.
Droughts are normal and necessary in a creative life.
"The time in the desert brings us clarity and charity," writes Julia. "When you are in a drought, know that it is for a purpose." This is something I understood intellectually, but Julia got it into my heart; rather than resisting the periods where you don't feel creative, lean into them. Sometimes, you need to lay fallow, which will create more fertile ground for future endeavors.
These are just a few of the insights I gained, and doing The Artists Way precisely as it was designed caused some profound shifts in my life. I highly recommend it if you haven’t encountered Julia’s work before.
Julia has a new book in The Artists Way series called Living the Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Greater Creativity. I was thrilled to interview her about it and will run that conversation on Friday Wednesday as a companion to this essay.
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"...I used my constant reading of nonfiction as a way to numb out. I also realized that instead of filling my well at the end of the day by spending time drawing, knitting, playing with my dog, or talking to another human, for example, I usually went straight to reading a nonfiction book where I could learn something. My poor brain was never getting a break. I was addicted to information—I always needed to know more and be more informed, which I came to see as the block of perfectionism. I also was spending too much time reading other people's ideas and not making enough room for my own ideas to germinate."
OOF. This really struck a chord, Kirsten. I'll be pondering this for a while...!
I too did the Artist’s Way back in the 90s. It seems to be a game-changer for a lot of people.
Tried the Morning Pages back in the day, but honestly, it ended up shutting me down creatively. I guess I needed different outlets at the time. In a weird way, though, it was helpful! It made me realize how much I felt like I was blocked as a writer, and that led me to therapy to deal with some much deeper childhood stuff. Turns out, those issues weren't really accessible through writing for me anyway. My material was pre-verbal and drawing helped me more than writing did at the time.