Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I finished The Artists Way over the weekend. It did less of the stuff that really irritated me in the back half of the book–a tactic that only served to irritate me more when it did intrude. I don’t necessarily regret reading it–there’s plenty of useful points to noodle over–but I don’t know that it’s a book I’d ever recommend. The most useful part of it was comparing the spiritually tinged processes laid out with something like The Accidental Creative, which gives you a toolkit for much the same kind of focusing-in-on-process and refilling-of-the-well in a much more pragmatic (and, to my mind, sustainable) way.

I’m following Cameron’s book full of frothy writing-and-spirituality with Lilith Saintcrow’s collection of writing posts, The Quill and the Crow. It’s an interesting contrast–Saintcrow’s very much from the school of “So you want to be a writer? Have you tried, say, actually writing? This shit is work” school of advice, but it’s undercut by a genuflection towards the idea that the stories are an external force that show up when you create space for them. Process is just a way of inviting them in when they show up.

The Saintcrow is the more useful book for me at the moment, as the idea that I should just write and finish things is one I need reminding of when I get derailed by life events.

It’s a simple, pragmatic solution, but it’s just crazy enough to work.

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.

So I’m gearing up to release the next Short Fiction Lab release in two weeks, and the pre-orders are going out with a 99 cent price-tag in the US.

Naturally, this meant today started with me dropping a Macklemore Thrift Shop reference while writing up the promo for the newsletter, because that song always gets in my head every time I price something at 99 cents. Given that song was everywhere in 2012 you probably don’t need a refresher, but here’s a link in case you were very young, trapped in Antarctica for a few years, or you’re just feeling nostalgic.

Going down the youtube hole obviously led me to the Post Modern Jukebox cover, which deploys Thrift Shop in a swing jazz style and is just all-around fantastic. You can go listen to it here, and I recommend you do.

Which, of course, now means I’m reading Kelly Link’s The Faerie Handbag because it’s the greatest thrift-shop-based fantasy story going.

And while I should be trying to sell you on picking up a pre-order copy of Short Fiction Lab 3: A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road, I’m just going to quietly point out you can read (or re-read) The Faerie Handbag over on Kelly’s website for free.

I mean, I’d still dig it if you went and pre-ordered my story and all. It’s a road trip, and a ghost story, and a story about things falling apart when you’re expected to adult without clear guidelines for what that looks like.

But it’s still two weeks until Short Fiction Lab 3 drops on July 31. It’s a terrible source of immediate gratification.

In the choice between waiting and getting your short fiction on here and now, always go for the now.