The Artist’s Way: Recovering a Sense of Compassion (Week 9)
On fear, enthusiasm and creative U-turns.
Welcome to Life after Trauma; I’m Clare Egan. We’re in Week 9 of The Artist’s Way, a community exploration of the intersection of creativity and recovery.
You know the drill: each week, we read a new chapter of The Artist’s Way and do our best to write our Morning Pages and schedule an Artist’s Date. On Tuesdays, I share my reflections on that week’s theme and on Fridays, we gather to share our experiences in the weekly thread. Next week, we’ll be taking our final rest & integration week. We’ll return for Chapter 10 on May 27th.
Our next (& maybe final?) gathering will be on Sunday June 8th at 1pm Irish Time. Please leave a comment below if you’d like to attend.
Here’s an overview of our schedule for May:
The Artist’s Way Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion
I enjoyed chapter 9. Julia Cameron was unusually encouraging and advised readers to have empathy for our mistakes and missteps, to ask for help when we need it and to create a work environment that encourages play more than rigid, disciplined work. Compassion (& especially self-compassion) are growth areas for me. I’ve gotten a lot better at it, but it doesn’t come easily or intuitively to me.
But in this moment of my life, I really need to find some self-compassion. I’m deeply exhausted. I’ve been neglecting myself. I’ve been pushing myself too much. I’ve been dealing with envy. I look at other people’s work and feel the sharp agony of ‘less than’. I’m trying to have compassion for my maladaptive coping mechanisms (people-pleasing, neglecting myself, sacrificing myself to keep the peace) but it’s easy to slip back into old habits of self-recrimination. Chapter 9 was a welcome reminder of the power and necessity of self-compassion. It’s always a good time to “reparent the frightened artist child who yearns for creative accomplishment”.
“Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear.”
I hate the word lazy. My younger self used that word as a cudgel to beat myself with. In my experience, it’s almost never accurate. It’s a cruel word, and also a profoundly inaccurate one. Cameron encourages us to begin with creative baby steps. It reminds me of something I heard from Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh, the inventor of Sugru, a playdough-like substance that hardens into a strong, flexible rubber overnight. One of her mantras is: start small but make it good.
This community is far from some of the biggest on Substack, but I believe in doing good work. I think good work attracts the right people, and from that foundation you can grow. But everything starts with one small step: the next scene, the next idea, the next creative experiment. “The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist”, Cameron writes and I appreciated the reminder to focus on the small, consistent daily steps that make up any creative project.
Cameron dislikes discipline, which she describes as “useful but short-lived”. For me, discipline has been profoundly useful. My creativity thrives within a structure. When I don’t have a framework for my ideas, I feel rootless and overwhelmed. But the reliability of discipline has made my work possible. This is where The Artist’s Way lets us down. It’s a book that proselytizes about Julia Cameron’s kind of creativity, without leaving much room for folks to explore and discover their own perspectives. It asks us to accept one person’s experience as fact, without offering us an opportunity to experiment and see what resonates in your life. It reminds me of
’s book ‘The Four Tendencies’ which examines how different personalities respond to motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) and rules (either imposed by you, or by another person/institution). It’s a book that acknowledges how unique people are, and offers a framework to understand how we can best support ourselves to do good work. It’s impossible to find a ‘one size fits all’ solution to something as complex and multifaceted as creativity, and the fact that The Artist’s Way tries to achieve that might be its biggest failure.“Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us”
Leaving discipline aside, Cameron encourages us to rely on enthusiasm to sustain our creative work. In my experience, this is bad advice! Enthusiasm is a beautiful thing to bring to our creativity. But when you’re 60,000 words into a sprawling project, feeling lost and overwhelmed, it’s not enough to sustain you. Enthusiasm is a fleeting thing. You’ll need something else to keep you going through the hard moments, thoughI did appreciate her perspective on prioritising playfulness: “Convince your artist it is safe to come out and (work) play”.
Perhaps my biggest take-away from this chapter was Cameron’s systematic approach for starting a new project by listing your fears, resentments and what you stand to gain by not completing this creative project. This could be a really helpful thing for me to do later this summer when I feel ready to return to the novel I wrote during Covid. The only thing I’d add to her suggestion is a list of the things I would gain from embarking on this creative project. As we’ve seen before, Cameron tends to have a bias toward the negative but I know I’d find the positive things deeply motivational. It reminds me of something I saw in the launch coverage for
’s new book ‘Consider Yourself Kissed’. Jessica motivated herself through the draft with M&Ms and a massage after every 10,000 words. It’s such a fun, playful way to acknowledge progress toward a big goal and is something I’d love to experiment with!
Other thoughts & reflections from Chapter Nine:
“Art is a process. The process is supposed to be fun” Yes! Amidst all this strategising, I never want to forget this.
“A productive artist is quite often a happy person” And often, an unproductive artist is an unhappy person.
“The blocked artist typically expends a great deal of energy - just not visibly. The blocked artist spends energy on self-hatred, on regret, on grief and on jealousy. The blocked artist spends energy on self-doubt.” It’s no wonder I’m so tired! 🙃
“A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures” I appreciated Cameron’s perspective on creative U-turns and the importance of developing resilience in the face of setbacks. I was grateful to see that her first instinct was sympathy. She acknowledges that creativity can be scary and it takes courage to leap. Her analogy of a skittish horse who refuses a high fence and needs to circle the field a few times before trying it again really resonated with me.
Throughout this chapter, Cameron encourages artists to ask for help, which pairs nicely with chapter 7 about creative jealousy. How would my creative life change if I saw the people I envy as peers and fellow artists, rather than living, breathing embodiments of my failures to achieve some arbitrary goal?
It wasn’t in this chapter, but huge thanks to
who shared this list of 100 Artist Dates. There are some great ideas here, if you need some inspiration!
Tasks
“In order to work well, many artists find their work spaces are best dealt with as play spaces” I often find the most enjoyable and useful tasks not in the ‘tasks’ section of the chapter, but somewhere littered throughout the text, which is where I found this idea. I’m lucky enough to have a small home office. You might have seen it in pictures or if you’ve joined one of our virtual sessions. It’s lined with rainbow bookshelves, has a cozy armchair for reading and a fluffy rug that adds an extra layer of cushioning when I roll out my yoga mat. Cameron has some other ideas to make a workspace feel more like a playspace, which I’d like to explore this week. Do I need a fish tank? Some Christmas lights? Some flowers?
Read your morning pages. Ehh.. nope, not going to do this. Or at least not right now. I’ve done this in the past and found it very useful, but it requires a certain emotional solidity that I know I don’t have right now. If you decide to do it, please let me know how you get on in the comments.
Visualising. One of the worst things about my PTSD is that my vivid imagination kept horrifically traumatic scenes alive in my mind and body. It was one of the things that made my recovery much more difficult. I’ve often thought about using those imaginative skills to dream about a more beautiful future, and I’m excited to give it a try this week.
Priorities. List your creative goals for the year/month/week. Creativity often feels like an amorphous, fluid thing which makes it hard to know where to start. For me, I always default to my novel. You might have noticed that over the last few months! 🙃 But it’d be useful to expand my lens a little. Beyond that project, what other creative ideas would I like to bring to life?
Work through a creative U Turn. Oof, this’ll be hard. My trickiest examples are the times I sacrificed myself/my creative projects (why do they feel like the same thing?!) to earn money or do something more “sensible”. I might not have the heart- or brain-space to work through those questions this week, but I know I need to. I am adding it to my list for this summer. (An aside: The Artist’s Way is a dense book and I often find myself craving a little more time to live alongside these ideas and see what resonates with me. Even with the rest/integration weeks I’ve built into the process, it often feels a little rushed. Do you have the same experience? I’ve been thinking about writing a post reflecting back on this experience in 3 or 6 months time. Let me know if you’d be interested in reading that!)
“Choose an artist totem… something you immediately feel a protective fondness toward. Give your totem a place of honour and then honor it by not beating up on your artist child” Just reading this suggestion made me emotional, which makes me think I need to do it. Even if it’s just a simple stick figure, I think having a physical object could help make my artist child feel more real and therefore more worthy of protection.
REST. I need more rest. Longtime readers might have observed a cycle of exhaustion/burnout and mild recovery over the last few months. I’ve noticed too, and know I need to find a better way to balance my creative energies. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I know that I won’t find it until I make space for some deep, restorative rest. That’s my priority for the weeks ahead.
It brought me so much joy to sit and write this post to you today.
Thank you for reading. I have gotten so much from this experience of shepherding this community through The Artist’s Way and that’s only possible because you show up each week to read what I write and share your experiences in the comments. I hope you know that I never take your time and attention for granted.
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Clare, I loved as always your take on Jane Cameron and The artist's way. You made me smile with your remark "Cameron was unusually encouraging" in this chapter. I also agree that enthusiasm alone won't cut it when you are at the point in a project that you so aptly described. As for discipline, I think it has a role, too, that is as long as I don't crack it like a whip but rather discipline allows me to build a fence that I have full permission to kick down, with no self blame.
I find the word "Devotion" can often work better for me than "Discipline."
Devotion to what I love to do, to my purpose, my dharma, as a writer is the gentler and more forgiving pull to the page. I once had to sum up in an exercise "my why" as a writer. I wrote" "Because I am a writer in my soul. I always have been. This is at the heart of my searching--not to run from the truth, whether it's my own truth or the truth of the characters on the page--but to seek it out, no matter how painful. I keep going because I have stories to tell that I want to share, that I need to share, in order to feel like I am living the life I was always meant to live. And I also keep going because my voice longs to be heard. Because I have something important and valuable to say."
Why I need to cultivate my sense of compassion this week, more than usual, is that I bravely handed over the first 5 pages of a novel I had been pitching to agents, without much success, and had spent three years and 11 drafts revising. I thought it was "ready." But I trusted this former MFA professor and published author and generous and compassionate guide to writers (she is all of these things) and purchased a service to have my first 5 pages critiqued. Because clearly they were not getting agents (67+) to say either, "I want to read this manuscript" or "I've read it and I want to represent you." (Two of them did read it and passed on representation). I got back her detailed, meticulous, incredibly helpful analysis, both some big-picture ideas of how to address the trajectory of the novel, and then line-by-line edits of what worked and what didn't and how to capitalize on what did work. All of it, such good good stuff. I am not stranger to having my work critiqued. I've been a founder and facilitator of writing groups for over 30 years. I've hired developmental editors. And yet when I received this particular critique I felt very deflated. Was it a coincidence that I suffered an inexplicable stomach illness and headache the very day I received thse notes? That I just wanted to sleep and forget about being a writer, or at least the writer of this particular novel.
I do know myself, though. I will lick my wounds awhile--because some of what she points out about making my protagonist come alive on the page are things I thought I had learned, goddamit! :-)--but then I know on a better day, I will tackle her suggestions with vigor. Because I do not want to give up on this novel or my middle-aged female character who I dreamt up in 2021 and whose story I want out in the world. I need to re-read my own devotional "why" again above: I write because I have something important and valuable to say.
This is why I'm going to jump on Cameron's suggestion on p. 159 of a series of questions to ask yourself when work grows difficult or bogs down, to list any resentments you have in connection with it, any fears about it, what I would gain by not doing this piece of work and YES, Clare, brilliant, I will add the category of what I will gain by carrying through with the piece of work. Because I agree that is so much more motivating.
As for Creative U-turns, I've had a lot of those in my writing career. I won an award for an unpublished middle grade novel, first prize, and I finally got an agent for it, but he couldn't sell it to a publisher. I gave up on the novel completely rather than take his advice to try small presses directly. I wrote a YA novel and never carried it through to the subsequent revisions despite spending a year in workshopping it with my then writer's group. And now this third novel, contemporary adult's fiction, women's fiction, the one that isn't winning over agents and got that recent critical analysis, I thought was evidence that I could write a good-enough novel. I've started a fourth novel and that one is stymied too at the moment.
As I write this long comment, I realize I need self compassion to remind myself that for the first time in my life I am suffering from a debilitating degenerative spine disease, chronic pain, for the past almost 3 months, where I can only stand to write--and so it is okay that I am not, at this moment, the disciplined, prodigious workhorse of a writer I know I can be.
Still, I can remain devoted. To words. To language. To my creative artistic child. Let her doodle. Let her daydream.
Hugs to all! May you have a compassionate week.
I have finally arrived at my week 9, and found this post particularly thought provoking (as well as the actual chapter).
I find it interesting to hear how others view enthusiasm and discipline. I have spent my life beating myself up under the guise of discipline. Enthusiasm has been the salve that drives me to fun. In fact, Cameron’s point about the roots of the word being “filled with a deity” (the Wikipedia def) is fascinating because it speaks to the fire that burns inside me that fuels my creativity. To your point, when I’m deep in the middle of a project, nurturing the fading fire of enthusiasm does me more good than beating myself up with rigidity and discipline.
Play is a huge thing for me this week. Thanks for sharing your journey and holding space for this community!