A Solid Way Through, With Terrible Scenery

So I’m reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way for the first time this week, following close to two decades of people recommending it. I’d been resisting it for a long time because the first person to recommend it to me was a friend with rather undiscerning tastes when it came to self-help books, the kind of person who’d press books about becoming a millionaire into my hands then seem put out when I argued that it was basically a ponzi scheme wrapped up in woogy language and siphoning expertise from others like a vampire, while the writing engaging in rhetorical cheats on par with Who Moved My Cheese.

So I was primed not to like The Artists Way, despite the fact that it seemed to help an awful lot of people over the years. Right now, I’m about three chapters into the book, and I’ve thus far come to two conclusions: the first is that I really, really hate the book, even more than I assumed I would; the second is that it will probably do exactly what it advertises, in terms of getting people creating and working on projects after years of feeling stuck.

I hate it because Cameron deploys several of the rhetorical devices that I so loathe in self-help books. It’s not quite at the Cheese level of creating a parable and immediately showing someone being helped by the parable within the narrative, but it’s got a second chapter where the subtext is all about how following the Way will make you superhuman, while approaching it’s talk of God and woo-science ideology with anything like skepticism will ultimately make the Way’s failure all your fault.

And yet, I suspect it works for many people because it uses all the spirituality and fru-fru packaging of ideas to tackle a fundamentally useful thing: getting your attention away from the long-term results, and focusing in on a day-to-day process instead of fretting about what will happen once everything is done. The tools for doing this are solid, once you strip out the rhetoric that surrounds them, but there’s nothing particularly innovative about them. Personally, I’m unlikely to follow the Way with any seriousness (outside of expanding my daily dairy to three pages instead of two). My “I need to focus on process again” practice is pretty well set, and in case of emergency I’ll break out Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook or Ursula LeGuin’s Steering the Craft and follow the exercises they lay out when I need some low-key, practicing-scales type stuff to get my fingers moving again and my brain focused on story.

But I’m not sure the innovation of the exercises matters to much in the Artists Way (although it may yet surprise me). It’s the rhetoric that’s selling this, setting it apart from similar books–the narrative of creative recovery and transforming your life is a hell of a lot sexier than promising to support a creative practice. If it’s the story you need to get back to work, there’s a lot of power in that.

It’s not a story that appeals to me much, though.

Interestingly, if you look hard at The Artists Way, you can see the echoes of AA’s twelve steps in the structure–to the point where I’ve downloaded a copy of the twelve steps to keep beside me check off as we reach each one as I go along. This could well the the thing that keeps me reading to the end–if nothing else, it’s a useful exercise for understanding the way narratives and psychology interact and a reminder that changing those personal narratives can have a big impact.