by Julia Cameron. 2001.
We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. Anton Chekov advised actors, “If you want to work on your acting, work on your self.” This same advice applies to working on our writing. Our writing life, our life “as a writer,” cannot be separated from our life as a whole. Start where you are.
What if we didn’t have to be good at writing? What if we got to do it for sheer fun? What if writing were approached like whitewater rafting? Something to try just for the fact of having tried it, for the spills and chills of having gone through the rapids of the creative process.
Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change. Because writing is a practice of observation as much as invention, we can become curious as much as frightened in the face of change. Writing about the change, we can help it along, lean into it, cooperate. Writing allows us to rewrite our lives.
We must be small enough, humble enough, to always be beginners, observers. We must be open to experience, new experience, new sources of knowledge and insight, while still staying grounded in the fact that what we already know and have done is also estimable, also important. In short, we must stay big enough to recognize that any individual criticism, any negative feedback, accurate or not, must always be seen in light of the bigger picture: we have actually made something and we plan to make many–and perhaps better–things more.
Writing rewards practice. Writing rewards attention. Writing, like sex with the right partner, remains a gateway to greater mystery, a way to touch something greater than ourselves. Writing is an act of cherishing. It is an act of love: I love this and this and this. Like any great love, writing is specific–not generic. If we are to write well, we must practice being specific. The specificity of a writer’s detail, the willingness to disclose detail, allows or bars intimacy.
Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to all alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform what happens to us into our own experience. It is a way to move from passive to active. We may still be the victims of circumstance, but by our understanding those circumstances, we place events within the ongoing context of our own life, that is, the life we “own.” … When we write about our lives we respond to them. As we respond to them we are rendered more fluid, more centered, more agile on our own behalf. We are rendered conscious. Each day, each life, is a series of choices, and as we use the lens of writing to view our lives, we see our choices.
We become an unexamined maw into which our encounters and experiences rush unassimilated, leaving us both full and unsatisfied because nothing has been digested and taken in. In order to integrate our experiences, we must take them into account against the broader canvas of our life. We must slow down and recognize when currents of change, like movements in symphony, are moving through us.
We are all works in progress. We are all rough drafts. None of us is finished, final, “done.” How much healthier and happier if we put it–all of it–in writing: the flaws, foibles, frills, fantasies, and frailties that make us human. When we connect these dots, we connect.
So much of what we need, so much of what we want, is to be savored, cherished, cared for, and cared about. So much of what is missing is tenderness. When we commit our thoughts to paper, we send a strong and clear message that what we are writing about and who we are writing to matters.
Very often what stands between us and our writing is a desire to be able to write perfectly, to spare ourselves rough drafts and even rough spots. We want to be able to perfectly conceive a final product and write that. This desire to avoid what we think of as dead ends often keeps us from writing. In order to write freely, we must be willing to write less formally. We must allow our writing to be a process that helps us to process. “Write it, you can always change it.” This is the rule of thumb for first drafts. This is the starting gate.
Give us too much self-involvement and we lose our involvement with the world. Yes, then we are boring. When we center our writing lives on our writing instead of on our lives, we leach both our lives and our writing of the nutrients they require. In order to bloom, all of us need a root system. Just as a regular practice of writing roots us firmly in our lives, a regular life roots us firmly in our writing.
When writing dominates a life, relationships suffer and, not coincidentally, so does the writing. When writing is about being shut off from the world in a room sequestered with our own important thoughts, we lose the flow of life, the flow of new ideas and input that can shape, improve, and inform that thought. Writing might profitably be seen as an activity best embedded in life, not divorced from it–of course such a view of writing smacks of heresy.
It is my belief that all of us are naturally intuitive and that writing opens an inner spiritual doorway that gives us access to information both personally and professionally that serves us well. I call this information “guidance,” lacking another word. I suggest that all writers should consciously and concretely experiment with guided writing. Questions should be posed, and then the answers received should be weighed against concrete experience… it is my considerable experience, based on my own life experience and that of my many students, that an open mind, a spirit of scientific inquiry, and the willingness to delve into the unknown can lead all writers to an unexpected inner resource that will greatly enrich both their lives and their work.
As we write, we are both describing and deciding the direction that our life is taking. As we become honest on the page about our likes and dislikes, our hopes and dreams, as we become willing to be clear, the murk of our life begins to settle and we see more deeply into our truth. Writing centers us in ourselves and it moves us out from that center into the world around us.
I am a working artist. This means I am a pragmatic artist. Support from friends is a sensible workable writing tool, and I use it. Some of the best dates of my life and some of the best writing that I’ve done in my life have occurred on Writing Dates. “Let’s go to the coffee bar and write for an hour or two,” I have often proposed. There is something enlivening about writing in duos.
We commit, then the Universe commits. We are the cause; the Universe delivers the effect. We act internally and the Universe acts externally. I believe that if one of us cares enough to write something, someone else will care enough to read it. We are all in this together, I believe, and our writing and reading one another is a powerful comfort to us all.
Very often, when people think about writing, they picture the writer’s life being best when it contains vast savannas of freedom–huge bolts of structureless, unused time. I’m not so certain about that. In fact, writing benefits from other commitments. Writing responds well to some gentle scheduling. A day job not only promotes solvency, it promotes creativity as well. The writing life may strike you as unimaginable. It may seem too hard, too daunting, too confrontational. Like the rocky field, it may look like too much work. But the rewards are solid. The gains are real. And on any given day, you need only do an honest day’s words and the rest will follow.
Yes, I want a revolution. I want us to take back the power into our own hands. I want us to remember we have choices and voices. I want us to right our world, and writing is the tool I feel helps us to do it. Writing is an active form of meditation that lets us examine our lives. … To be truly human, we all have the right to make art. We all have the right to write.
Pages must be done in the morning. You want to catch your mind before it has its defenses up. You want to surprise it when it’s still close to your dreaming consciousness. You do not want your Morning Pages to march like perfect little soldiers, to be a carefully manufactured product of your rational workaday self. What you do want is to catch your self unawares, to record things you didn’t really know you were thinking. Just as walking aerobicizes the physical body, producing a flow of endorphins and good feelings, writing seems to alter the chemical balance of the soul itself, restoring balance and equilibrium when we are out of sorts, bringing clarity, a sense of right action, a feeling of purpose to a rudderless day.