The Artist’s Way is Elitist Trash (And it totally works)

 

The morning sun peeks over two mountain ranges in New Mexico - the Sangre de Cristos of Santa Fe and the Sandias of Albuquerque, both moodily draped in clouds. 

Two writers begin their morning pages - a stream-of-consciousness brain dump to kickstart creativity. One of these writers is me, hunched on my tattered blue cloth couch, scribbling as quickly as I can before I have to get ready for my desk job. The other is Julia Cameron on her leather upholstered chaise, in her million-dollar Santa Fe home. Nestled next to me is a cat I found in a dumpster. At Julia’s feet, a purebred westie. 

We are both completing one of the pillars of her New Age self-help creativity bible, The Artist’s Way. The book draws a direct link between creativity and spirituality as the means of “unblocking” creatives who feel stuck or unproductive. It promises to be effective for “any one interested in creative living”, whether your art is a career or a hobby. Elizabeth Gilbert, Alicia Keys, and Doechii have publicly declared their love for the book, and have credited it for some of their greatest creative successes. 

The book lays out a twelve-week course that consists of reading a chapter from the book at the start of the week, completing the tasks at the end of the chapter. The other two pillars are the daily morning pages and a solo “artist date” once a week.  

The prescription was deceptively simple. 

When I began to contemplate doing The Artist’s Way, I was in a creative rut. I was feeling like my creativity was waning, my zest for writing fading. I stared at blank pages, and simmered with resentment for writers who seemed to effortlessly produce piece after piece. I stopped writing for a few months because it was too painful to flesh out ideas that fell flat as a jostled soufflé, or to read and reread my own mediocre writing. 

I was falling out of love with what was once my lifeblood. 

After seeing that Doechii had posted her Artist’s Way journey on Youtube prior to becoming famous, I chatted with a writer-friend about doing the course. She thought that it required too much discipline to write every single day and not read for a week, but encouraged me to try it. 

Well, I thought to myself, even if it doesn’t work at least it will give me something to write about. 

And boy, did it. What I found instead was that the book is elitist trash, the stuff of nepo babies and the privileged - those who have the safety nets that allow them shirk responsibilities, spend frivolously, and waste time - like the worst trustfund fratboy working for daddy’s company making more than you could ever hope to.

The entire book is filled with the psychobabble used by the wealthy to justify their ill-beggotten riches and explain away the poverty of others. Her utter blindness to this, her total lack of knowledge about the lives of normal people with normal jobs is astonishing. She paints herself as an everywoman struggling artist, a real grassroots creativity guru. However she is nothing but a privileged grifter selling the idea of creative living. 

The Quiet Part 

The course requires that specific tasks be done at specific times, meaning that the course must be shoehorned in around the rest of life’s daily activities. 

The worst of these tasks are the morning pages. 

We are instructed that we should take 30 minutes every morning before our first cup of coffee to write three longhand pages of stream-of-consciousness writing.   

I wasn’t sure where I was going to find those 30 minutes when my mornings are already pretty packed between a workout, getting ready, and commuting to my desk job. 

Requiring that this task be done only in the morning makes it difficult to fit in, and I am a childless cat lady. I’m not sure how a person with children would fit the morning pages into their day at all. 

I am no stranger to the experience of time poverty - having too many things to do but not enough time to do those things. The constant juggle of work, social life, relationships, rest, health, and hobbies leads to the feeling that there is never enough time. 

As a working person in the US, time off is scarce, long commutes add hours to already long workdays, and growing income inequality amidst decreased job security is ushering in the death knell of the middle class. Privatized healthcare means that my health status is a personal project, my responsibility. Working and commuting five days a week requires that nearly all life-admin must be squeezed into the two precious days that bookend every workweek. 

Wealthy people are able to buy back their time in ways the average person cannot - they can outsource their cooking, cleaning, childcare, transportation, financial management, and the hundred other minutiae of adult life that must occupy the non-working, non-sleeping hours in a person’s day. 

Many of us dream of being writers, and that dream is perennially out of reach. Today especially, writing is not a profitable endeavour for most. We squeeze writing in on stolen time - after work but before dinner, before childcare pickup, whenever we have those few rare moments or unaccounted for time.

Using a precious 30-minute block of time to scribble my stream of consciousness felt like an affront. As if I had time in my day to do this AND the other writing I wanted to do. 

It took Julia Cameron six chapters to finally put in plain text the fundamental elitist premise of the course: 

“Creative living requires the luxury of time.”

I have to agree.

Risky Business

Each chapter of the book is followed by a list of eight to ten tasks to complete. They include things like collecting pretty rocks, making lists of other lives you’d like to lead, collecting images of your ideal life or things that bring you joy, doing your mending, and going on long walks. 

Then, in chapter four, came the reading deprivation. 

Readers are instructed that for one week they are not to read anything - not newspapers, not billboards, not books, not magazines, not the mail. My copy of the book was published in the late 1900s, long before the ubiquity of smartphones. Julia has since put out further guidance that reading deprivation extends to social media, video, television, email, and text messages as well.  

The idea is that the boredom of reading deprivation should stir up creativity as readers are unable to entertain themselves with the words of others. 

Cameron admits that this is the task that receives the most pushback. 

Cameron chides the reader, “I have had jobs and I have gone to college and in my experience I had many times wriggled out of reading for a week due to procrastination.”

I’m glad that Julia Cameron’s experience of work didn’t have any stakes. 

For the entirety of the 12 week course, I was professionally caught up in leading an emergency response to a highly infectious, vaccine-preventable disease. 

There would have been real world consequences for refusing to read. People’s health, their lives. Much more than a deadline or a grade was at stake. I would also have been fired. Promptly.

The book wanted me to jeopardize my career and I don’t have the kind of safety net that would allow me to take those kinds of risks. Not in this economy.

For me, my job is my  lifeline. Without it, there is no housing, no food, no healthcare. 

None of this should be surprising coming from Julia Cameron. She is the daughter of an ad executive, was briefly married to Martin Scorsese, and every “friend” mentioned in her book is a lawyer, director, agent, or famous writer - “Timothy” the millionaire, “Phyllis” the socialite. Her proximity to wealth and power reveals her own, making her motto “jump and the net will appear” even more trite. 

Artist Dates, Authentic Luxury, and Asshole Billionaires 

The other repeated task in the course are artist dates. The parameters for the artist dates are simple: an outing that must be done alone, for at least two hours once a week purely for enjoyment. Easy enough. 

I was dismayed that all the activities Julia suggested in the book for artist dates were expensive (even if she claims artist dates can be done cheaply). Here’s a list of things she suggests: 

• Flamenco classes

• Scuba diving lessons 

• Visiting an art museum

• Rock climbing

• Horseback riding lessons

• Going to see a film 

• Going to the aquarium 

In my area, none of these activities are low-cost or even affordable.  

I flirted with the idea of flamenco classes. 

Albuquerque is the flamenco capital of the US, so classes were abundant, but never less than $150 a pop. Even flamenco shows (called a tablao) were upwards of $50 per event. 

I opted for as many free artist dates as possible. The idea of spending money on me “just because” is a lovely idea. I’m strict with my money and often don’t spend it on myself. The issue is the mandate to spend money on frivolities every week for the duration of the course. 

It should have been unsurprising then, that in the same chapter where she tells us that time is a necessary luxury for creative living, Julia Cameron encourages readers to engage in “authentic luxury”, telling us, “it is critical that we pamper ourselves for the sense of abundance it brings to us”. 

As an example, Julia tells the reader that her idea of “authentic luxury” was buying a horse. 

The entire book is imbued with a privileged, consumptive mindset that assumes everyone has the time and resources to go on artist dates, or to buy “authentic luxuries”, and if you cannot access these resources, you will be unable to unblock your creativity. 

Throughout the book she handwaves the stench of privilege away by telling us that since creativity is the “mystical union” between the Great Creator and the creative mortal, we must look to God in order to find abundance. 

“As you expect God to be more generous, God will be able to be more generous to you” 

This reeks of the law-of-attraction, abundance-mindset crowd of the contemporary New Age movement. The inspirational quotes in the margins of the book say things like “Money is God in action” and “Money will come when you are doing the right things”. 

This is where Julia Cameron lost me.

I fundamentally cannot believe there is a God that grants abundance to people like Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. Is what they’re doing right? Are they good people? Do they deserve their wealth?

Working folks are being priced out of existence, snatched off the street by the modern-day Gestapo, our legislature bought and sold by billionaires, yet I should look to God for wealth and abundance? 

This book may have been written in the halcyon days of the early 1990s, but I cannot abide by an ideology that conflates money with deservingness. Poor people don’t “deserve” to be poor, nor do rich people “deserve” their wealth. 

God doesn’t exist, but billionaires do, and they’re buying our political and economic systems to further enrich themselves by siphoning wealth from the lower classes. That is why working people don’t have the time and money to live a creative life. 

Ultimately, creative living is a class signifier reserved for the wealthy and privileged. It is defined by excess time and the ability to frivolously consume goods and experiences. 

After all, you don’t make money by selling ideas and courses to the people - you make it by selling ideas to the wealthy. 

On The Other Hand…

I realize that up to this point, I have gone pretty hard against The Artist’s Way for its elitism, however I do have to admit that over the past 12-weeks, I’ve been more inspired and creatively productive than I have been in months (and maybe ever in my life).

I didn’t complete the course exactly as written, but it still worked for me, and my creativity spilled outside the bounds of writing. I made a zine, painted a mural on the wall of my home office, began dressing unconventionally, and started writing a novel. I hadn’t ever known creative freedom or output like this. 

The morning pages were key to much of this creative output, and when I stopped doing them after the 12-week course, my creativity fell off a cliff. 

The morning pages help me explore my thoughts and feelings about writing online, allow me to dream about the desires I’d never stated out loud before. I felt that this daily task kept my creative projects on the front of my mind, even when work was stressful or a million other small worries and tasks threatened to swallow me whole. The ideas for essays flowed, sometimes in concepts or images, sometimes entire phrases and paragraphs. 

While The Artist’s Way has a clear and obvious class bias, there are portions of the book that are effective. As a person who works full-time and experiences time poverty, there were parts of the book that were not feasible and I did not complete. This is what I think would make it easier: 

Making It Work for Working People

One thing that could make the course easier for time-poor people, is to have the course week start Monday and end on Sunday (Monday you read the chapter and complete the tasks, and then the following Sunday you complete the weekly check-in activities). That gives you an entire weekend to try and pull off an artist’s date. I planned my weeks Sunday to Saturday, which made me feel like I didn’t have enough time to squeeze in the artist’s dates on Saturday before the deadline.

I would also encourage working people to look online for free artist dates ideas. There are a plethora of blogs on The Artist’s Way that have long lists of free artist date activities. I failed to look into this until much later into the course, and I wonder if I would have completed more artist dates if I had a bank of ideas going into the course. 

Some of the artist dates I did take myself on: giving myself $20 to spend at the farmer’s market on anything I wanted; going to my city’s free ArtWalk event; luxuriating in the grass at a nearby park to read my book and peoplewatch; taking the High Road to Taos and visiting the Santuario de Chimayó (which I wrote about here). 

I would also buy cheap notebooks for the morning pages, weekly tasks and check-ins. In the introductory chapters of the book, Julia encourages the readers to buy a nice, new notebook for the course, but I would caution against it. 

I filled two and a half composition notebooks during the course. You write three morning pages a day, plus around two pages for the weekly activities. The $0.39 composition notebooks worked great and I wasn’t upset when I had to buy a second and third notebook to accommodate all the required writing. I also liked that I had ample margin space to jot down some of the ideas that came to me while I was doing the morning pages. 

For chapter four’s reading deprivation, I think this exercise is just as effective as a regular media detox. I don’t have to tell anyone this, but putting employment at risk for a creativity course is a bad idea. Forgoing TV, radio, movies, social media, and enjoyment reading are all ways to reduce external stimuli and stimulate creativity while maintaining gainful employment. 

Finally, I would encourage folks to disregard the God-and-money talk. Skip that chapter if you must, or skim it and keep it pushing. Don’t let this rich white lady tell you that God is the reason you are poor. 

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Creativity is free, and finding time to do something creative is a universally pleasurable human experience. While I feel a lot of gratitude towards The Artist’s Way for helping me be more creative and return to my creative center, it is frustrating that much of the method requires belonging to a particular social class to fully participate. 

While my feelings towards this course are complicated, I don’t want to discourage anyone from trying it out. You might just be surprised at the results.