I only read the first 35 pages of "The Artist's Way" and already made this one change

It shouldn't work, but then it suddenly does

Hello!

I was at the library and stumbled quite literally¹ into finding “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. I have seen it mentioned multiple times by other Substack writers as a way to reboot or restart one’s creative juices, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Not to spoil the first 15% of the book, but the first chunk of the book requires the artist to start doing two things:

1. Morning Pages

2. The Artist Date

The Artist Date involves carving out time to do special things for the artist inside all of us. Maybe this is literally going to an art museum or seeing a movie, or sometimes it’s sitting outside and staring at clouds. Now that it’s summer vacation, my family and I do evening walks after dinner with the occasional bike ride. This is always a point where we all reach a calmness, and I use this opportunity to look at the pond in our neighborhood and watch the baby ducks waddle around, or try and find the perfectly odd shaped leaf or stick, and imagine some story about it.

Morning pages are self-explanatory. Every morning² , I get up and crank out 1-3 pages in a notebook. The first week I wrote exactly 3 full pages. It was so time consuming and emotionally exhausting that it became more detrimental, so the next week I skimmed it down to 2 pages. Around week 3 I settled into 1 or 1 .5 pages. Maybe this is breaking the rules, but I am getting the intended benefit that Cameron promotes.

The entire concept of the pages is this: make something bad. Every day. Just get it done and then put it away. The book stresses that everyone must do this, even non-writers. Everyone writes pages in a book and then shuts it and doesn’t go back and re-read it for at least 8 weeks.

I started doing this 3 weeks ago, and while my first few days were complaining about doing this, I got into a routine.

Yesterday, I just woke up and started doing it without thinking about it. Later that day, I made a video. I did the same thing again today.

There’s something freeing about starting my day by making this thing that gives me a sense of accomplishment and also a very low bar to clear.

The best way to improve creativity is to make stuff, and if you are like me, there is a critic voice that tells me that thing stinks. But the morning pages help mute that guy, because I know this is a thing that stinks, and yet I continue on.

So there: I have read the first ~30 pages of the book for you. Start making bad stuff without consequence to unlock and clear out the mind to make better stuff, and stare at clouds or whatever uplifting thing works to boost creativity.

And while you’re at it, you can always go ahead and make a quick video in 5 minutes:

1. Make sure your shoes are tied at all times.

2. For some weird reason, it has to be morning, I tried it at night and it’s difficult. Probably because it doesn’t unlock anything. Instead it made me sleepy.