I’ve decide to start a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and I’m excited to document my progress and experiences here on the blog. I’m sharing this journey for a few reasons; first and foremost, as a way to hold myself accountable. As a growing writer and painter, I still find it difficult to believe in myself. I often hold myself back and feel like I have an unending amount of work to do to become the kind of artist I want to be. In some ways, I think this thought process is valuable because it keeps me in a state of learning. But it can also cripple my progress and put me into states of inertia. I’m hoping that the tools in this book will help me to gain confidence and learn the discipline necessary to work on my crafts in a sustainable way long term.

I am also sharing my experience here because this blog is a space that, in some ways, resembles the goals of the book. The Artist’s Way is a text that aims to give people tools to unlock their creativity; to get us thinking and acting on our creative urges. In this way, this blog similarly aims to give people tools for creativity in the form of educational posts and resources for creative inspiration. I think this series will be a valuable addition to the blog and, I hope, to all of my readers here.

Goals

The Artist’s Way provides, tools, prompts, and meditations over the course of 12 weeks. My goal, then, is to write a weekly blog post documenting my progress and exploring the impacts this book has on my creativity. I want to see how much I can grow as a writer and a painter with the tools provided, and I also just want to see what other spontaneous events occur while using such a book. Just from reading the introduction, I’m getting the sense that there can be some surprising impacts on ones creativity from using the tools provided, leading artists to explore their creativity in unexpected ways (it all sounds very fantastical, in a good way!).

I will also write supplementary posts when necessary if aspects of my experience necessitate further explanation. Some of my secondary goals are to provide support for others who may use this book and to build a community of creative people to share our experiences. This initial post is more or less a declaration and announcement of this new series, and I hope you find this series as valuable and fun to read as it will be for me to document.

Conclusion

This is my first week, but I’m calling it week zero so I can read through the rest of the introduction, casually start the morning pages, and set some goals for myself before my 12 weeks actually begin. My next post this week will be a brief exploration of the content in the introduction and my impressions of those ideas, and then I will dive into week one! I’m excited to get started, and I’m excited to share my experience with all of you. Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts, and tell me what your experience has been with this book if you have used it before! See you all in the next post!