Skip to main content

Writer books: The Artists Way

I thought I'd do some posts on books to do with writing. Books that I've found useful over the years. Some I've purchased are in e-Book form, but to be honest, I think print is still the best, so that you can make notes and underline and so on. I know you can make notes on a Kindle but I'm at the stage where I've spent so much of my adult life looking at a screen, it does my eyes in. I think print is great, when you can. 


The Artists Way books by Julia Cameron are books I highly recommend. Not a craft book or a How to, its more a book on being a writer, or an artist, or any kind of creative person, whether you are writing a lot or thinking about writing, or painting or sculpting or any kind of creativity. Its about finding out what is holding you back, if that is the problem. Its about being more creative.

I first read this book twenty plus years ago and it changed my thinking on writing as being a hobby of not much importance, to the possibility of it being a legitimate career path. You know, as in being a nurse or an accountant or digging drains is more important then writing a book, that kind of thinking. Which is nuts, because where would we be if people did not create?

The book is set out as a 12-week programme filled with readings, exercises, and spending every morning writing three pages of your own thoughts down. That in itself is a useful exercise because to me it is much like the premise of brainstorming: you get the obvious stuff out of the way, and are forced to dig deeper to find the gold. Its like you're mining your own mind and when you have to write three pages, you get there. 

I would suggest, if you haven't read it, to borrow a copy from the library and give it a go. The programme suited me as I like material with a spiritual edge to it, and I love concepts like serendipity/synchronicity. Also, I did the course again during the Covid, after some years of not having picked up the book, and found it fabulous. Its the sort of thing you could do every year I reckon. It would also be great to do with writer friends, although I've never done that, but I'd like to, just to see what others get out of it.



If you buy it, places like Book Depository have it and even better, shout out to Book Depository, they have free shipping.

Even now just talking abouit, I'm thinking I might embark on another reading of it. There are other books in the Artists Way series, but The Artists Way is the first one. Highly recommended!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Wet weather

It is starting to get cooler, praise be. There was a heap of rain one day this week, and by the time I got to work I was damp, to put it mildly. Soaked is overstating it but uncomfortably wet. Have you ever tried to dry off your trousers with a hair dryer?  I would have been there forever! If only, I thought, I had a spare anything at work, like a skirt even, but no. Nothing to change into. There was only a pair of pantyhose in case I ripped them, although I had stuffed spare socks and boots in my bag so I could have dry feet at work. It is worth noting that the very next day I went to work, I had completely forgotten that thought about spare clothes altogether and did not take spare anything for future weather events. In fact, I only remembered as I was thinking about writing this blog post. Hopeless. Given I’m trying to keep up my walking part-way to work to get in a good 40 minutes/steps, I should take along spare clothes to keep in my locker just in case. It really was uncom...

My latest obsession

 I have recently been a bit obsessed with the practice of junk journalling. Junk jouraling! I love it so far. Its been around a few years and seems to have taken over a bit from from the scrapbooking of yore, but the thing I like about it is you use up all your stuff that is lying around. You can use all your rubbishy bits and pieces of paper and things. I like the tutorials of a lady called Leah with a channel called Thrifty Day , and I've had a go at it and I kind of really like doing it. Sometimes I feel a bit out of sorts (I blame hormones... or perhaps it is, rather, the lack of them!) and so I decide to cut stuff up and stick it on a page and I feel better. Therapeutic! I also think that because it is play and there are no rules and you can be as messy as you like, and start again if the page looks like utter rubbish, well, it is just so good for you. It's like being a kid and let's face it... we got to do all the cool stuff when we were kids. Why not , now we're ...

An old post

This is a blog I wrote for a now defunct pop culture site I used to contribute to, some years ago.   A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.”   The only Jane Austen I have read is “ Emma .” and it was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets, oh my gosh!) but analysing Emily Dickinson was enough to sap the will to live right out of me. Fortuitously, at the end of that semester, I saw the movie Stargate on TV,  and promptly un-enrolled myself fr...