Bliss Habits Book Club: The Artist’s Way Chapter/Week 7

Welcome to Tuesdays with Chel.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.
– Julia Cameron

Welcome to the Bliss Habits Book Club! For the next several weeks, we’ll be discussing and working our way through The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. This week I’ll be talking about Week/Chapter Seven.

The discussion is continued on Facebook, as well. Please join us.

Julia Cameron hits on four incredibly intense issues in chapter seven/week seven. It’s getting slightly eerie how the topics she covers each week are somehow very relevant in my creative (and non-creative!) life. I’m wondering if there really is a flow to this whole process, meaning if some of these issues naturally arise as each step is worked through.

The first issue she covers is: LISTENING

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down. The directions are important here. If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that’s just beyond our grasp, ‘up there, in the stratosphere, where art lives on high….’ When we get something down, there is no strain. We’re not doing; we’re getting. Someone or something else is doing the doing. Instead of reaching for inventions, we are engaged in listening. … we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.” – Julia Cameron

I LOVE this. LOVE it. I love the idea of being a “conduit” rather than a creator. It sort of takes the pressure off, at least for me. I can see what she’s talking about, too- sometimes ideas pop into my mind and if I follow them as they flow, things turn out well. But when I start relentlessly editing, monkeying with it, altering it, more often than not the idea doesn’t translate well.

I wonder what it would be like to JUST spend a week or so listening and being a conduit. I wonder if that’s even possible. It makes me think about how many creative ideas I may have either stomped all over or silenced. Cameron writes:

“With practice, we learn how to hear the desired frequency on request. We tune in to the frequency we want. Like a parent, we learn to hear the voice of our current brainchild among the other children’s voices.”

This is something I’m definitely going to have to work on. It’s a little scary, to be honest. I can’t imagine what would happen if I sat down and *created*, without any sort of filter or editing. I guess that’s exactly what children do- they just sit down, uncap their markers, and have a blast.

Cameron also writes:

“We consider these finds to be small miracles. What we fail to realize is that they are, in fact, the norm. Our job is simply to get them down.”

Of course, this leads into the idea of how we *process* our creative ideas, how we edit them, how we ultimately alter them so much they are no longer related to the original thought at all. This is because of our relentless PERFECTIONISM. Cameron writes:

“Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.”

She also mentions that perfectionism is a form of ego. We believe that deep inside us lies some absolute AMAZING creative force, and our job is to “clean up” the path so it can make its way outside of us. The truth is, there IS no amazing creative force that’s being blocked from roaring out of us in the most perfect, universally-applauded way. All we have to do is figure out the right technique, the right combination of approaches, the right work/life balance and then it’ll all click into place.

The truth is, all that is inside us are quiet ideas and we need to get the heck out of the way and stop all the excuses and nonsense and just let them come into their own.

“The perfectionist writes, paints, creates with one eye on her audience. Instead of enjoying the process, the perfectionist is constantly grading the results. For the perfectionist, there are no first drafts, rough sketches, warm-up exercises. Every draft is meant to be final, perfect, set in stone. The perfectionist is never satisfied. To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement.” – Julia Cameron

This resonated with me so much I stood up while I was reading it.

I am a relentless editor of my own work. It’s absolutely exhausting and disappointing. I am constantly adding to things, adjusting them, trying to “fix” them. I do it so often that I wind up trashing a tremendous amount of my creative work simply because it turns into a big disaster. I never know when to stop. I keep thinking “maybe if I just add another layer of paint, it’ll be the exact right thing to take it from looking merely ‘okay’ to being a ‘masterpiece’.”

“At a certain point you stop writing it and go on to the next thing. That is a normal part of creativity—letting go.” – Julia Cameron

Again, this is something I need to practice. Just moving on to something else, even if I feel the creative work I’ve done is not good enough, if it could be better. I think we all are aware of the little voice inside us that says “that’s enough now. We’re done here.” For me, it often speaks through feelings of anxiety, exhaustion, frustration. I often ignore that voice in favor of the one that booms “ADD MORE PAPER. TRY SOME PAINT OVER THERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST COVER IT ALL WITH GESSO AND THEN WIPE IT OFF AND MAYBE HIDING IT LIKE THAT WILL MAKE IT LOOK INTERESTING ENOUGH THAT IT WILL VALIDATE THE TIME YOU SPENT ON IT AND YOU WON’T FEEL SHAME HAVING THIS THING BE OUT IN THE WORLD.”

Yikes- I *truly, truly* did not intend to write that. But it all poured out. I think I’ve got some work to do in this department.

And it’s ironic that letting go, that *stopping* the creative process is what Julia Cameron considers RISK. But when you think about it, it’s so true! Imagine just letting a creative project *be*, letting it to go out into the world when it doesn’t feel quite right? That makes me deeply uncomfortable.

“The success of a creative recovery hinges on our ability to move out of the head and into action. This brings us squarely to risk…. We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly. Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success. Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled, smothered, despairing, bored. But, yes, we do feel safe. And safety is a very expensive illusion.” – Julia Cameron

Reading this makes me realize that my job, my creative *goal* isn’t to be a “fixer-upper”. I’m not interested in presentation or editing. I’m not interesting in being the “airbursh” person who comes in and makes things flawless. What I’m interested in is creating. And just writing this makes me realize how off course I have gotten with my creative work. I have been editing and presenting for a very long time. What I haven’t done in a while is purely create.

“As blocked artists, we unrealistically expect and demand success from ourselves and recognition of that success from others. Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen. There is something enlivening about expanding our self-definition, and a risk does exactly that. Selecting a challenge and meeting it creates a sense of self-empowerment that becomes the ground for further successful challenges.” – Julia Cameron

So how do we do this? How do we start from scratch, creatively? How do we turn back the clock, learn to become a conduit to the quiet ideas in our head instead of the loud critic that has to toy with everything that we create? Cameron suggests that JEALOUSY might be a good place to start. She writes:

“Jealousy is a map. My jealousy had actually been a mask for my fear of doing something I really wanted to do but was not yet brave enough to take action toward.”

This was very interesting to me. I think we all experience some level of jealousy, but for me, I think it came out in the form of resentment.

For example, when Etsy first became popular, I would get *very* angry with all the people on there clearly trying to make a quick buck. You’d have these struggling artists selling gorgeous, handmade art and then there’d be someone trying to sell a thrown-together piece of junk (like a petrified hot dog with a toothpick stuck in it) for either an insane profit or just some attention.
I thought about that today. Why did I feel so much anger and resentment? Opening an Etsy shop was something I wanted to do for a while, but didn’t actually commit to until this past summer. Probably the resentment and anger was a “mask” for my guilt over putting it off for so long. If Sham Hot Dog artist had his act together enough to list his stuff, then what did that say about me that I kept putting it off?? What did it say about my creative work?

And I like Cameron’s point about the fear of scarcity:

“[Jealousy] doesn’t allow for the abundance and multiplicity of the universe. Jealousy tells us there is room for only one—one poet, one painter, one whatever you dream of being. The truth, revealed by action in the direction of our dreams, is that there is room for all of us.” – Julia Cameron

This is *so* true. I mean, who among us doesn’t feel a little personal sting when one of our creative friends has a big success? Not that we want them *not* to succeed, but we wonder if there’s a place for us, too.

I think we are constantly translating everything that happens to and around us through some crazy, uber-critical filter. If our artist friend is successful, then it must mean that we are failures. If our work is not always recognized and applauded, it must mean that it’s really bad. If our heartfelt blog posts and short stories are not commented on, it must mean that no one cares.

Why do we do this to ourselves? I think it actually loops back to the point Cameron made at the beginning of the chapter. We have to get still and learn, once again, to just *listen*. To provide a way for the ideas to get out of our heads and hearts and soul. That’s all we are supposed to be doing. Overthinking every creative move we make turns us into exhausted, over-critical editors.

As creative, we need to get back to basics, to the pure joy of creating because we love to do it and not because we are working towards a specific goal or recognition. The only thing that should validate our work is our own happiness while doing it.

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Chel Micheline is a mixed-media artist, curator, writer, and avid gardener/reader/swimmer who lives in Southwest Florida with her husband and daughter. When Chel’s not making art or pondering the Bliss Habits, she’s blogging at gingerblue.com (come say hi!) or posting new things in the gingerblue etsy shop.