The Moment of The Artist’s Way

Cover of Julia Cameron’s best-selling book designed to eliminate mentally blocking issues for all writers.

I belong to a small Slack group at work that meets every two weeks on Zoom. Together, we are five creatives who love books. Some of us write them. Some of us are working on them. Some of us are progressing toward working on and writing them.

It’s a varied group in every sense. We’re younger and older, male and female, structured and not. Put any topic out there, and the viewpoints are so different that it’s enjoyable just to listen.

I believe in serendipity, and this group somehow pushed a button for me. Within weeks of its creation, I happened upon a podcast by chance: The Moment with Brian Koppelman.

Koppelman is the creator and producer of the iconic film “Rounders,” in which Matt Damon, fresh off the smashing success of “Good Will Hunting,” opens the curtain on poker as a profession. He’s also the co-creator and show runner of Showtime’s smash series “Billions.”

The Moment is much younger than “Rounders” and slightly older than “Billions,” and it is an interview podcast. Koppelman does an hour of Q&A with creatives and other interesting people, and the core of the show is always this question: What was the moment when you realized, this is it?

In other words: "This is what I’ve been seeking. This is what my life is all about. This is what I was meant to do."

If you listen to the podcast regularly, you discover that Koppelman likes his guests to walk him and his listeners through their current creative processes. Koppelman often shares about his, too, and about how he was once blocked creatively and got unblocked by reading Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way.

Then, this summer, he coaxed Cameron into an appearance on his podcast. I was hooked on the book. I remain so.

The Artist’s Way

I researched Cameron and The Artist’s Way, which recently celebrated its 25thh anniversary in print and is now the heart of workshops that Cameron conducts (or did, before COVID-19). I bought the book, and it has changed my creative production.

I work every day on my latest manuscript. My word counts are as high, day after day, as they ever have been. Even though I am not at the point of re-reading my work with a critical eye, I know that what I’m creating for my second novel is so much . . . better . . . or advanced . . . from the initial draft of Dead Odds.

What more can a writer ask?

The Artist’s Way is not your ordinary “how to write a novel” book. Its subtitle says it all: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.

In many ways, Cameron’s words read like a modernized version of a 12-step guide.

It asks readers to buy in. It asks them to do perform psychological work on themselves. It’s a 12-chapter, 12-week workbook of sorts.

There are exercises to complete, some fun (list your favorite childhood foods), some taxing (go through s stack of magazines and clip images of things that represent you or your life), and some embarrassing (write a letter to yourself defending your emotions and views and mail it).

Daily Affirmations

It also involves writing daily affirmations. (I know, right? Does the name Stuart Smalley ring a bell?)

Why affirmations? Because people who understand authors and writers – creatives of all types – understand that many of them are their worst critics. No matter what someone else says about their work, they are the most damning.

To paraphrase the man from Animal House, "Constantly criticizing yourself is no way to go through life."

The goal is to identify, in ways that are both direct and subtle, your emotional blocks as a person so that you can unblock your creativity. The two, she believes, are intrinsically related.

Now, I am not halfway through the book, and I’ve gone taken extra time to go through a couple of the chapters. (Some of the weekly "tasks" I did not find fun at all, and it took me time to come to terms with them.)

That said, I’ll finish. I feel I’ll come out the other end better for it.

More to come.