The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (6 page)

It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.

MAY SARTON

Morning pages map our own interior. Without them, our dreams may remain terra incognita. I know mine did. Using them, the light of insight is coupled with the power for expansive change. It is very difficult to complain about a situation morning after morning, month after month, without being moved to constructive action. The pages lead us out of despair and into undreamed-of solutions.

The first time I did morning pages, I was living in Taos, New Mexico. I had gone there to sort myself out—into what, I didn’t know. For the third time in a row, I’d had a film scuttled due to studio politics. Such disasters are routine to screenwriters, but to me they felt like miscarriages. Cumulatively, they were disastrous. I wanted to give the movies up. Movies had broken my heart. I didn’t want any more brainchildren to meet untimely deaths. I’d gone to New Mexico to mend my heart and see what else, if anything, I might want to do.

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. I just got the insistent, inner sense that I should do them and so I did. I sat at a wooden table looking north to Taos Mountain and I wrote.

The morning pages were my pastime, something to do instead of staring at the mountain all the time. The mountain, a humpbacked marvel different in every weather, raised more questions than I did. Wrapped in clouds one day, dark and wet the next, that mountain dominated my view and my morning pages as well. What did it—or anything—mean? I asked page after page, morning after morning. No answer.

And then, one wet morning, a character named Johnny came strolling into my pages. Without planning to, I was writing a novel. The morning pages had shown me a way.

Anyone who faithfully writes morning pages will be led to a connection with a source of wisdom within. When I am stuck with a painful situation or problem that I don’t think I know how to handle, I will go to the pages and ask for guidance. To do this, I write “LJ” as a shorthand for me, “Little Julie,” and then I ask my question.

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.

ROBBIE GASS

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

LJ: What should I tell them about this inner wisdom? (Then I listen for the reply and write that down, too.)

ANSWER: You should tell them everyone has a direct dial to God. No one needs to go through an operator. Tell them to try this technique with a problem of their own. They will.

Sometimes, as above, the answer may seem flippant or too simple. I have come to believe that
seem
is the operative word. Very often, when I act on the advice I have been given, it is exactly right—far more right than something more complicated would have been. And so, for the record, I want to say: pages are my way of meditating; I do them because they work.

A final assurance: the morning pages will work for painters, for sculptors, for poets, for actors, for lawyers, for housewives—for anyone who wants to try anything creative. Don’t think they are a tool for writers only. Hooey. These pages are not intended for writers only. Lawyers who use them swear they make them more effective in court. Dancers claim their balance improves—and not just emotionally. If anything, writers, who have a regrettable desire to
write
morning pages instead of just do them, may have the hardest time seeing their impact. What they’re likely to see is that their other writing seems to suddenly be far more free and expansive and somehow easy to do. In short, no matter what your reservation or your occupation, morning pages will function for you.

Timothy, a buttoned-down, buttoned-lip curmudgeon millionaire, began writing morning pages with a skeptic’s scorn. He didn’t want to do them without some proof that they would work. The damn pages had no label, no Dun and Brad-street rating. They just sounded silly, and Timothy hated silly.

Timothy was, in street parlance, a serious player. His poker face was so straight it looked more like a fireplace poker than a mere cardsharp’s defense. Practiced for years in the corporate board room, Timothy’s invincible facade was as dark, shiny, and expensive as mahogany. No emotions scratched the surface of this man’s calm. He was a one-man monument to the Masculine Mystique.

“Oh, all right ...” Timothy agreed to the pages, but only because he had paid good money to be told to do them. Within three weeks, straightlaced, pin-striped Timothy became a morning-pages advocate. The results of his work with them convinced him. He started—heaven forbid—to have a little creative fun. “I bought guitar strings for this old guitar I had lying around,” he reported one week. And then, “I rewired my stereo. I bought some wonderful Italian recordings.” Although he hesitated to acknowledge it, even to himself, Timothy’s writer’s block was melting. Up at dawn, Gregorian chant on the stereo, he was writing freely.

Not everyone undertakes the morning pages with such obvious antagonism. Phyllis, a leggy, racehorse socialite who for years had hidden her brains behind her beauty and her life behind her man’s, tried the morning pages with a great deal of surface cheer—and an inner conviction they would never work for her. It had been ten years since she had allowed herself to write anything other than letters and bread-and-butter lists. About a month into morning pages, seemingly out of nowhere, Phyllis got her first poem. In the three years she has used pages since, she has written poems, speeches, radio shows, and a nonfiction book.

Anton, grumpy but graceful in his use of the pages, accomplished unblocking as an actor. Laura, talented but blocked as a writer, painter, and musician, found that the morning pages moved her to her piano, typewriter, and paint supplies.

While you may undertake this course with an agenda as to what you want unblocked, the tools may free creative areas you have long ignored or even been blind to. Ingeborg, using the pages to unblock her creative writer, moved from being one of Germany’s top music critics to composing for the first time in twenty years. She was stunned and made several ecstatic transatlantic calls to share her good news.

Often, the students most resistant to morning pages come to love them the best. In fact, hating the morning pages is a very good sign. Loving them is a good sign, too, if you keep writing even when you suddenly don’t. A neutral attitude is the third position, but it’s really just a defensive strategy that may mask boredom.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

PABLO PICASSO

Experience, even for a painter, is not exclusively visual.

WALTER MEIGS

The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.

STEPHEN
NACHMANOVITCH

At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.

JEAN HOUSTON

Boredom is just “What’s the use?” in disguise. And “What’s the use?” is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.

THE ARTIST DATE

The other basic tool of
The Artist’s Way
may strike you as a nontool, a diversion. You may see clearly how morning pages could work yet find yourself highly dubious about something called an
artist date.
I assure you, artist dates work, too.

Think of this combination of tools in terms of a radio receiver and transmitter. It is a two-step, two-directional process :
out
and then
in.
Doing your morning pages, you are sending—notifying yourself and the universe of your dreams, dissatisfactions, hopes. Doing your artist date, you are receiving—opening yourself to insight, inspiration, guidance.

But what exactly is an artist date? An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers. You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist, a.k.a. your creative child. That means no lovers, friends, spouses, children—no taggers-on of any stripe.

If you think this sounds stupid or that you will never be able to afford the time, identify that reaction as resistance. You cannot afford
not
to find time for artist dates.

“Do you spend quality time with each other?” troubled couples are often asked by their therapist. Parents of disturbed children are asked the same thing.

“Well ... what do you mean, ‘quality time’?” is the usual weasely response. “We spend a lot of time together.”

“Yes ... but is it quality time? Do you ever have any fun together?” the therapist may press.

“Fun?” (Whoever heard of having fun in a rotten relationship like this one?)

“Do you go on dates? Just to talk? Just to listen to each other?”

“Dates? ... But we’re married, too busy, too broke, too—”

“Too scared,” the therapist may interrupt. (Hey, don’t sugarcoat it.)

It is frightening to spend quality time with a child or lover, and our artist can be seen as both to us. A weekly artist date is remarkably threatening—and remarkably productive.

A date? With my artist?

Yes. Your artist needs to be taken out, pampered, and listened to. There are as many ways to evade this commitment as there are days of your life. “I’m too broke” is the favored one, although no one said the date need involve elaborate expenses.

Your artist is a child. Time with a parent matters more than monies spent. A visit to a great junk store, a solo trip to the beach, an old movie seen alone together, a visit to an aquarium or an art gallery—these cost time, not money. Remember, it is the time commitment that is sacred.

In looking for a parallel, think of the child of divorce who gets to see a beloved parent only on weekends. (During most of the week, your artist is in the custody of a stern, workaday adult.) What that child wants is attention, not expensive outings. What that child does not want is to share the precious parent with someone like the new significant other.

Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds—your artist might enjoy any of these. Or your artist might like bowling.

Commit yourself to a weekly artist’s date, and then watch your killjoy side try to wriggle out of it. Watch how this sacred time gets easily encroached upon. Watch how the sacred time suddenly includes a third party. Learn to guard against these invasions.

Above all, learn to listen to what your artist child has to say on, and about, these joint expeditions. For example, “Oh, I hate this serious stuff,” your artist may exclaim if you persist in taking it only to grown-up places that are culturally edifying and good for it.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

C. G. JUNG

Listen to that! It is telling you your art needs more playful inflow. A little fun can go a long way toward making your work feel more like play. We forget that the imagination-at-play is at the heart of all good work. And increasing our capacity for good creative work is what this book is about.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

PABLO PICASSO

During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so
much
joy and delight.

FRITJOF CAPRA
PHYSICIST

You are likely to find yourself avoiding your artist dates. Recognize this resistance as a fear of intimacy—
self
-intimacy. Often in troubled relationships, we settle into an avoidance pattern with our significant others. We don’t want to hear what they are thinking because it just might hurt. So we avoid them, knowing that, once they get the chance, our significant others will probably blurt out something we do not want to hear. It is possible they will want an answer we do not have and can’t give them. It is equally possible we might do the same to them and that then the two of us will stare at each other in astonishment, saying, “But I never knew you felt like that!”