The Artist's Way for Authors: Is the Art in Fiction Lost?
Bella Rose Pope
A forever-learning, create-your-own-life touting, cheese enthusiast.
Like many would-be authors, I’ve made up stories since I was a kid. I’ve been writing them, hoping to publish novels, for a full ten years. Have I finished writing a novel? Have I published? Not yet. After a decade of trying, I turned to a book called The Artist’s Way.
Because something was wrong.
With me. With many writers, actually. With artists in general, especially in American culture. I realized that I had an unhealthy relationship with writing fiction and couldn’t seem to commit to any ideas and finish projects.
The Artist’s Way changed a lot about my writing, and I’m here to let you in on how you can also get your writing mojo back, even if you don't realize you’ve lost it.
What is The Artist’s Way?
The Artist’s Way is a book written by Julia Cameron, an author, film writer, poet, filmmaker, composer, and a bunch of other artistry titles, that covers a twelve week process of $ unblocking yourself$ from whatever creative pursuit is your flavor. And if you don’t know what your specific art medium is, but you just feel creative and stifled in normal life, it’s good for that too.
Needless to say, because of her lengthy artistry job titles, this woman can finish her art. She can also teach others the process of doing it in highly effective ways.
You might see The Artist’s Way talked about as a spiritual method of being more creative, and that’s true. There is an element of a "higher power" involved in the creative process, whether that's a god, the universe, or some other entity or concept that you best relate to. It’s about whatever you believe, and how you can use that to work out your, let’s just say, issues.
In short, The Artist’s Way is a twelve-week individual intensive that reconnects you to the root of your creativity, strips you of what’s holding you back, and gives you the confidence to create again.
The Necessity of Finding Your Creativity in a Culture Fixated on Capitalism
The last decade of writing for me has been sporadic, anxiety-filled, and full of the kinds of pressure most new writers are facing nowadays. I have written so much across various genres, attempted full novels many times, and even won $ NaNoWriMo$ once, only to not finish the full draft.
Just look at my attempts over the years—not even all of them:
Hop on the internet, type in "how to write a book," and get slammed with thousands of blog posts, ads, companies, and other writers telling you how to do it—each claiming that their method is the right method. That is, if you want to $ earn a living doing it$ .
And don’t we all?
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really dreamed of being a starving artist—the kind of writer hunched over a small screen, refusing to let anyone read what I wrote. Or worse, publishing proudly and still having nobody read it.
That led me down a path of "how to make a living writing fiction" and I was met with even more advice, with claims of quick riches. Self-publishing has made the possibility of earning a living with writing accessible.
If you do it a certain way.
If you follow this process or that.
If you write in these genres and publish with these categories.
All of it is true. There are methods to $ make money writing$ . It’s just that by trying to do it that way, I lost what made writing fun to me.
The $ purpose of writing fiction$ has, to so many people, become about the money instead of the art.
With a focus on selling and money, the art of fiction was lost to me. I was being strategic in my genre choices. I was forcing $ tropes$ I didn’t even like for the sake of an audience who might.
There may be nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make an income from your writing…as long as you’re not sacrificing the enjoyment of the art itself. If you don't love writing, there are better ways to make money!
I could make up those profitable stories. I could plot and write in the strategic target genres.
But it didn’t feel like art. It felt like an assignment I had to get right, and I’ve never been the kind of person to do homework. So I never finished any of them.
There are more reasons to write a book than to make money from it, despite the industry’s cry to the contrary.
How The Artist’s Way Helps Fiction Authors
When you get The Artist’s Way, it’ll take you twelve weeks to complete if you’re following the guidelines. You’ll read a passage each week, then complete a set of activities to reveal truths about yourself and reconnect you with the deeper aspects of creativity itself.
It can work for many artistic mediums, but The Artist’s Way is particularly helpful for authors, because the author also writes novels. She gets it.
Some of the activities seem silly, like taking yourself on an Artist Date, which is pursuing something creative by yourself. Or coming up with a list of would-be careers you’d have liked to have if you didn’t settle where you are (which I like to call my "alternate reality Bellas").
Another activity you’ll do for the entire process is writing Morning Pages, AKA, journaling three pages in a notebook first thing every morning. This is what the author swears by.
The results for me were surprising, and I’ll cover those below.
Because of the prompts and activities, you’ll uncover insecurities and deeply buried beliefs about yourself or your writing that have held you back.
You’ll get answers to questions like:
1. What am I trying to say?
2. What do I have to offer the world?
3. What’s valuable about my perspective and life experience?
4. Why do I want to write books?
5. What’s my voice?
6. What should I write about?
These are all extremely important to your writing. It’s the heart of what your fiction stories will be about, no matter which genre or type of story you want to write.
It’s what makes stories both worth writing and worth reading.
And if nothing else, they’re important things for you to understand about yourself.
That’s why I highly recommend The Artist’s Way for authors. The outcome for me has been life giving.
Overall Outcome of Going Through The Artist’s Way for Authors
The Artist's Way changed my creative process in two significant ways.
First, there was the self-learning experience.
Then, there was the creating experience.
Self-Learning Experience from The Artist’s Way
The human brain is so good at hiding the truth from itself. We can even point out problems and flaws in others that we only recognize because they live in us, but we can’t see them in ourselves.
At least, not unless there’s a spotlight shined on them, forcing us to pay attention.
That’s the effect of The Artist’s Way for authors. There were many things I learned about myself, but four stand out more than others and have stuck with me even months later.
Here’s what I learned about myself that I didn’t realize was affecting my ability to write (to make art):
- A mentor figure early in my writing journey accused me of copying their writing (I very clearly didn’t), which mortified me into having a fear-based approach to anything I plotted or wrote since then. This was particularly problematic because of the value I have always placed on the originality of ideas and writing. I overthought everything, changed any detail if it was even similar to anything I’d read before, and that made the process nearly impossible.
- The fact that my family always made fun of me for almost any creative pursuit made me feel self-conscious about anything I did and unwilling to talk about or share it with people. There was shame attached to my writing.
- I was made aware that I didn’t even know what I was writing about. Yes, I knew the plot. I knew the characters. But I didn’t know what I was trying to say with them. I had no themes or values from my own life. My stories lacked substance, and I knew it, because they all felt like they were missing something.
- Lastly, The Artist’s Way helped me realize that I never finished anything because I was terrified of being bad at it. As a quick learner with a natural talent for many things, the thought of being bad at something so important to me was immobilizing.
More than anything, The Artist’s Way connects you with the art of what you’re creating. For me, that meant the substance beneath the medium of writing.
The Creating Experience from The Artist’s Way
The goal of The Artist’s Way for authors is to get back to writing—and creating in general. The process is for people who struggle to produce and create, despite wanting to.
I had the question, and maybe you do too, of: Is it even useful to dredge up all this stuff about yourself?
The answer for me was a definitive yes, and here’s why.
1. I had reasons I could point to in order to talk myself out of insecurities.
Any time a voice cropped up telling me that my story was too much like a certain part of a certain book in a big series (halting my progress), I could tell myself that wasn’t my voice. That was my old mentor who had issues of their own to figure out.
2. I knew what I wanted to write, and no other purpose has mattered since.
There’s no rush to complete a story that’s not right anymore. There’s no fixing and adjusting to please people I don’t know, because I know what I want to write now. I just revisit that and am able to create.
3. I feel firmly rooted in my vision, voice, and perspective.
You wouldn't believe how much easier this makes doing the work. There’s no floundering. No considering this or that. I choose what I want to say with my books, and I craft the characters and stories around it.
It’s amazing how easy and natural it feels when it’s connected to a deeper part of your life experience. "Write what you know" takes on a very different meaning.
4. I have made more progress on my vision in the past few months than I had in the decade before.
This is what most of you want to know, right? Have I finished writing a book yet? No. But that’s only because I have an entire world to build for my fantasy stories—one that spans over 100,000 years. The first book of the first series is plotted.
I realized that I was playing too small for what I wanted to create, trying to write whatever story I could think up. For someone like me, that’s a lot of ideas. But what I truly want, what’s important to me for my art, is to create a unique world in which I can write many series and standalone novels, exploring an overarching fascination of mine (ancient history).
Most importantly, I no longer have fears. I think there will always be a small amount of insecurities, as with any type of art, but there isn’t fear tied to my writing anymore.
The Artist’s Way can hugely impact an author's progress, especially if you’re stuck in the throes of online advice columns and saturated discussion boards. If you follow the process laid out for you in the book, you’ll come out feeling settled and inspired instead of floundering for your artistic purpose.