Reflections from The Artist’s Way, Week 8: Recovering a sense of strength
This week, we focus on time. And time can be interpreted in at least two ways in relation to doing creative things. On the one hand, we often believe that we don’t have time for being creative. On the other hand, it has to do with how we perceive ourselves over time. We frequently think that we are either too old or too young to write, act, or create. The older we get, the harder it becomes to take creative risks and we have socially imposed expectations about the best times to do certain things, such as graduate from college or publish our first book. Cameron summed it up accurately:
“QUESTION: Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to play the piano?
ANSWER: The same age you will be if you don’t”.
She also recalls her own experience:
“<<I’m too old to go to film school,>> I told myself at thirty-five. And when I got to film school I discovered that I was indeed fifteen years older than my classmates. I also discovered I had greater creative hunger, more life experience, and a much stronger learning curve. Now that I’ve taught in a film school myself, I find that very often my best students are those who came to their work late.”
This is why it is so critical to take the next step toward your creative expression, even if it is as simple as brainstorming a project idea or going to the store to buy art supplies. This is what Cameron calls filling the form, that is taking the next small step towards realizing your creative aspirations rather than jumping ahead to an ambitious goal for which you may not be ready yet:
“Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop. This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing. By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion.”
“Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time - or at all. Instead of writing three pages a day on a screenplay, we prefer worrying about how we will have to move to Hollywood if the script gets bought.”
“Indulging ourselves in a frantic fantasy of what our life would look like if we were a real artist, we fail to see the many small creative changes that we could make at this very moment. This kind of look-at-the-big-picture thinking ignores the fact that a creative life is grounded on many, many small steps and very, very few large steps. Rather than take a scary baby step toward our dreams, we rush to the edge of the cliff and then stand there, quaking, saying, <<I can’t leap. I can’t. I can’t. …>>”
So, what would be your next little step toward realizing your artistic ambitions?
My breakdown looks as follows: in order to publish a graphic novel, on a good day, I need to very roughly outline and draft one panel a day. To begin, I can start collecting reference photos of locations I want to capture and mind-map the story.
Morning Pages: Instead of writing my Morning Pages by hand, I started typing them on the typewriter, and after the recent inconsistencies, I'm finally getting into the habit of doing so without fail. My writing has become considerably more introspective.
Synchronicities: Because it's Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, I've been hearing a lot about Japanese-American internment camps in the United States this week. I found this topic discussed in Beka Feathers and Kasia Babis’ Re:Constitutions, and I also found a copy of George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy in a Little Library, the graphic novel that I recently finished reading.
Artist date: I spend a lot of time writing and reading in nature while camping at my local forest preserve. Time seems to slow down when you’re away from screens and in solitude, and it was a very rejuvenating break.
This week Cameron also asks us to write about ourselves as if we were a color. The funny thing is that I’ve done that last month. I'm yellow, I'm creative, and my ideas are unconventional. I'm warm and kind like the sun. I’m a dandelion in the meadow and a sunflower in the fields of gold…
I followed the advice of Tony Robbins about starting his day off right by sending a few kind words to someone, shared in a conversation with Chase Jarvis. When hunches come to connect with or complement another person, I want to act on them right away. As a result, I had a few heartwarming interactions with people I don't know in person but whose work I admire, which made the week that much more memorable.
