Did The Artist’s Way Rip Off This Lesser-Known Book? Did Julia Cameron Steal Her Biggest Idea?
By now, thousands of people have seen my article, The Artist’s Way is Elitist Trash. In it I critique the classic book by creativity guru Julia Cameron. The article got a lot more attention (and hate comments) than I anticipated, but I stand by everything I wrote.
Well just a few months ago, at a charity book store in Silver City, New Mexico, I happened upon a copy of Writing Down the Bones (1986) by Natalie Goldberg, for a sensible $2. I had never heard of this book before, but for $2 I was willing to risk it.
I took the book back to the strawbale cabin I was renting at the edge of the Gila Wilderness and sat in the warmth of the late-winter sun and read. I read and read and finished the book, and then I turned back to page one and read it a second time. At this point, I think I’ve read this book four or five times.
Part writing/creativity book and part Zen meditation guide, this slim volume teaches writing as a kind of meditative practice, a practice that can produce quality, authentic writing, and a spiritual life.
This book is uniquely grounded and practical. Natalie’s writing is succinct and simple but still conveys Big Ideas about life and writing and practice.
During my initial reading of the book, I immediately wondered if Writing Down the Bones was an influence for Julia Cameron since the methods in both books are so similar.
The back of the book blurb about Natalie Goldberg says that she was living in Taos and hosting writing groups at the time of publication, which is immediately prior to when Julia Cameron moved to Taos and “discovered” her morning pages practice.
New Mexico - the state I live in - is one big small town. Everyone knows everyone, especially if you live in a smaller town like Taos and especially if you have a similar interest or profession. Even if she never attended one of Natalie Goldberg’s classes, I just find it hard to believe that Julia Cameron wasn’t at least aware that Natalie was teaching a writing practice in Taos while Julia was there to write.
In fact, the Occam’s Razor approach is that Julia Cameron was inspired by Natalie Goldberg and used that inspiration to develop and expand Natalie’s method into The Artist’s Way.
What in my mind lends credence to this is that in the first chapter in The Artist’s Way, Julia wrote, “Living in a small adobe house that looked north to Taos Mountain, I began a practice of writing morning pages. Nobody told me to do them. I had never heard of anybody doing them.” The lady doth protesteth too much.
Later Google searching revealed that yes, the two authors know each other, both now live in Santa Fe, and are friends. They don’t see each other as rivals…allegedly.
“Good artists copy; great artists steal” - Pablo Picasso
The Similarities
Here’s some of the similarities between these two books:
Spirituality
Both books use themes from the authors’ religions to talk about creativity and writing and how we can nurture the writer inside us. For Natalie Goldberg, that’s Zen Buddhism. For Julia Cameron, that’s Christianity. Julia claims that her conception of god is not a Christian one, it’s still an omnipotent entity that requires unquestioning obedience and submission.
The Writing Space
They also suggest creating a special workspace for you to write in. Julia Cameron has a couple smaller activities in The Artist’s Way that suggest making a private artist’s working space for yourself and then a longer section of the text discusses the importance of an artist's altar that is a space filled with images and scents.
Natalie Goldberg’s advice: “If you want a room to write in, just get a room.” She cautions that the creation of a writer’s studio - the process of painting the walls, finding decor, shopping for a desk - is just another way to avoid doing the very thing we’re creating the room for - writing. However, acquiring a place to write in can be a sign that you are more serious about your writing - as long as the space is used!
The Editor and The Censor
Both books discuss how during the process of creation, there is a time to produce and a time to edit, and these are different times. Write and write and write without second guessing yourself and then go back and edit later. They also both discuss how during their respective writing practices, the writing should be done without self censoring. Just commit to paper whatever comes up in the moment.
I realize that this probably isn’t the most unique or groundbreaking writing advice, but for the sake of rigor, I’m mentioning it.
The Works of Others
Both books include snippets from other writers - in Writing Down the Bones, Natalie includes a number of short poems from her favorite poets and Zen masters to illustrate her advice about syntax or why the size of your notebook matters. Natalie also includes snippets of conversation with her Zen teacher, Katigiri Roshi, where he discusses Zen, meditation, and writing.
The Artist’s Way includes short sayings from Greek philosophers, musicians, and famous intellectuals of the ‘70s and ‘80s about God and writing, abundance and art.
The Practice
The biggest similarity (and red flag) is that they both suggest developing a daily writing practice of stream-of-consciousness writing as the cornerstone of their respective methods. The rules are essentially the same in both instances.
The instructions for the timed writing practice from Writing Down the Bones are to write around a single topic for ten or more minutes. There are no limitations on topics and you are not required to strictly adhere to that topic. There are six rules: “
Keep your hand moving
Don’t cross out
Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar
Lose control
Don’t think. Don’t get logical
Go for the jugular”
The intention to commit yourself fully for that set amount of time to writing a stream-of-consciousness about that one loose topic. You go wherever your mind takes you, whatever feelings come up, you write it all down. Even if it is junk, you still write because doing so is practicing, just as you would for a sporting event.
Julia Cameron’s morning pages as having the following rules:
Write three longhand pages first thing in the morning
Write “whatever comes to mind”
“Keep your hand moving across the page”
“Never skip or skimp on the morning pages”
In both books, readers are also told to wait a while before going back and reading the pages they’ve written. Julia advises at least eight weeks from the start of the course. Natalie just advises to look back every month and see how the mind works and pick out the poetry that was written and wasn’t recognized at the time. Natalie suggests that we can take these bits of brilliance that show up in our notebooks and turn them into other things.
This writing practice was what sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out if Julia Cameron had stolen Natalie Goldberg’s idea.
The Differences
Intention
Fundamentally, the books were created with different intentions in mind. The Artist’s Way was written for people who feel stuck and blocked in their creativity, while Writing Down the Bones is for people who just want to write.
Therefore, the form of each book is reflective of the intention with which it was written. The Artist’s Way is framed as a course, while Writing Down the Bones is a more general writing guide. I think this form is why Writing Down the Bones has a more flexible structure than The Artist’s Way.
Flexibility
Natalie Goldberg suggests using our timed writing exercises (starting anywhere from 10 minutes of writing to an hour) without a particular time of day attached, to write around a particular topic. She advocates for getting cheap notebooks, since you should be filling them up pretty quickly by doing the writing practice every day, and a pen that allows you to write quickly.
As she states, there is no real secret to being a writer other than, well, writing.
The Artist’s Way requires that the morning pages be done first thing in the morning (I mean, it’s in the name after all), every morning. What Julia Cameron describes as an “apparently pointless process” requires the writer to rearrange their lives to accommodate the practice.
Craft
On the topic of writing, Natalie Goldberg provides actual advice - adding real-life details to bring realism to your writing but not so much that you “marry the fly”. She guides her readers on actually helpful advice around the common writing adage “show, don’t tell”. Natalie Goldberg sees writing as craft - something to be practiced and honed. The book is so sprinkled with these nuggets of wisdom, that when I feel stuck in my own writing, I flip the book to a random chapter and read it.
The Artist’s Way provides virtually no information about how to produce good art - production itself is the goal. If you are producing, that’s a positive development regardless of the quality of what is produced. This could also be a result of the intended audience of the book - people who feel unproductive in their creative endeavours, but it also seems indicative of Julia Cameron’s style itself, where she’s published a lot of books and none of them are particularly good.
Fame and Fortune
The focus on gaining fame and fortune from creating art didn’t particularly stick out to me when I was doing The Artist’s Way. It wasn’t until I read Writing Down the Bones that I noticed a complete lack of discussion about money or making money from writing. It’s about writing for intrinsic reasons - the joy of writing, self expression, mindfulness, to learn more about yourself and how your mind works.
The Artist’s Way’s focus on making money off art is woven throughout the whole book, as if it’s common sense that the big reason for creating is to make money from it. This view is already so baked into our current ideas about art and creation that came across as natural and I didn’t even really question it.
My Experience
I spent about twelve weeks doing Natalie Goldberg’s daily writing practice in order to compare it fairly against The Artist’s Way, which is also a twelve week course. If you have read my previous article about The Artist’s Way, you know that the morning pages practice was one of the few redeeming features of the book and I had a lot of success with them. Since it appears that The Artist’s Way was “inspired” by Writing Down the Bones, it was not surprising that I also really liked the timed writing practice Natalie Goldberg created.
Natalie’s personal goal is to fill one notebook a month through her writing practice. I was not quite that productive, but still got through two composition notebooks in twelve weeks.
One of the goals of Natalie Goldberg’s practice is to build confidence in your mind and body - that you build trust in your voice and creative process through being present and keeping your hand moving. Natalie also suggests using the practice as a warm up to other writing we plan on doing. I found this immensely helpful to get the juices flowing, and found I had to do less editing if I did the warm up first.
During the twelve weeks, I found that I was naturally writing about things I had never considered previously - random memories from childhood, my obsession with roadkill (essay coming soon), my family, the weather, the way the light shines through the terracotta curtains of my writing space. Things that felt so ordinary but to me were imbued with a nearly cosmic importance during those 15 minutes.
Getting to the headspace where words were flowing was not always easy. In particular, I often had times where I had trouble choosing a topic to write around. The book provides a couple different lists of topics at various points in the book, but finding one that resonated with me in the moment was difficult. However, once I did find the right topic it was like I finally accessed something real and almost euphoric - the physical sensation of my own life force flowing.
I was able to write with an emotionality and candor that I haven’t used much in my public writing. I felt deeply connected to myself and the page and the experiences I’ve had. I wrote faster and faster to keep up with the words popping into my mind like soap bubbles, hand cramping but not stopping. It was like magic. The feeling was euphoric, even when the topic and the feelings being dredged up were painful.
Through doing these pages almost every day for twelve weeks, I understand why Natalie Goldberg frames this as a spiritual practice akin to sitting meditation. The feeling of completing the timed writing practice was very close to a sensation that can be accessed deep in meditation when the mind finally settles and one pointed attention is placed on the breath. It’s pleasure and calm and brightness and time slows - like in a flow state. It’s incredible and it’s what the timed writing practice felt like sometimes - not every time, but often enough.
I do feel like the timed writing practice made my writing better. I felt a voice emerging, and language use expanding. The writing I was doing came easier to me, like there was a deeper well of words simmering in my consciousness that wasn’t there before.
I also like that there weren't a bunch of extraneous side quests of collecting rocks or answering ten short answer questions a week.
None of this is to say that the morning pages from The Artist’s Way don’t “work” - morning pages absolutely work. However, while doing the morning pages, there were days where I spent my precious writing time scribbling “nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing” for several lines because, unsurprisingly, there was nothing in my head at five in the morning. The morning pages didn’t feel productive in the same way as the timed writing practice, though morning pages are superior for generating new ideas, in my opinion.
On the other hand, due to an unfortunate quirk of my personality that loves intense structure and routine, I was less consistent with the timed writing practice than the morning pages. During my time doing The Artist’s Way, I missed fewer than five days. Over the past twelve weeks, I have missed…more than that. Because there is no specified time of day for the timed writing practice, I often left it until the very end of the day and sometimes it didn’t get done at all. I suppose this is more a result of my failure to center my writing in my life than a fault of Writing Down the Bones, but hey, a girl still has to commute, work, eat, tend to pets and partner, clean the house, maintain a social life and some semblance of health and fitness.
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I suppose in many ways Writing Down the Bones feels more…earthy than The Artist’s Way. It doesn’t ask us to imagine we were anyone else, it doesn’t suggest that we cut out of our lives anyone we perceive as not being supportive enough of our art. We are asked to write about the quality of light in our writing spaces, about one thing we feel strongly about, about our current obsessions.
It asks us to show up for ourselves and our writing, even if it’s bad, even if we don’t want to. And you still get some writing tips along the way. The Artist’s Way feels almost vacuous in comparison, all anecdotes about rich friends and assumptions about the reader’s childhood.
Now, I am biased — as a practicing Buddhist, the Zen inflection of the book was immediately familiar yet still a refreshing take on writing, and thus was much more appealing than the abundance mindset Christianity that Julia Cameron promotes.
Even Julia Cameron wrote in the reading list of The Artist’s Way that Writing Down the Bones is “the best pen-to-paper writing book ever written.” So good, that she had to steal the idea - and you should too.
Oh - and here’s a picture of the cat, Pudge, who runs the bookstore in Silver City where I brought my copy of Writing Down the Bones.
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| Pudge, the bookstore cat, Silver City, NM |
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