According to Julia Cameron, author of smash hit The Artist’s Way, there are two kinds of people: innovators and conservers. As artists, we are most often innovators: we create and invent, experiment and explore. Those who work with our work-agents, managers, publishers, gallery owners, curators, producers- are conservers. As Cameron maintains, “conservers focus not on the … Continue reading
On one of my most beloved advice shows, viewer Renee writes in complaining that her work lacks deeper meaning. After working in healthcare for several years, she worries her work as an artist won’t make the same kind of real-world impact. “I’m a little bogged down with the realization that my purely aesthetic work won’t … Continue reading
When asked what “big magic” inspired her to write Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert replied that as a writer she most often met people who yearned to live creatively but could (or would) not. When she talked to these people, they always had sensible reasons why they couldn’t get to the … Continue reading
After nearly 4 months, I finally finished the piece I was working on. Now that it’s complete, I’m nagged by that dreaded inevitable question: “what’s next?” This feeling is familiar to most writers. We work untold hours diligently, dedicatedly, even obsessively on a project, completely absorbed in an idea only to finally finish and feel … Continue reading
It’s always hard to get back to the page, especially when our writing routine has been periodically interrupted over a long stretch of time. If writing is a way of reconnecting with oneself, not having anything to say feels like a terrible kind of muteness. Like a traveler eager to book a hotel room, … Continue reading
Filling the form. Julia Cameron, creativity expert and spiritual guru behind the smash hit The Artist’s Way, defines filling the form simply as doing our daily work: “What do I mean by filling the form? I mean taking the next small step instead of skipping ahead to a large one for which you may not be … Continue reading
French-Russian novelist Francine Du Plessix Gray always begins her writing classes by asking students to compare the following sentences, the first from Nabokov’s memoir of his youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia, Speak Memory, the second from Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. “She turned on the steps to look back at me before descending into a jasmine-scented, … Continue reading
As I focus more on my writing, I find myself more concerned with whether or not my work is original. Reading my writing, I see the glaring marks of other authors: the figurative language of Plath, the gorgeous but conversational musings of Anais Nin. I turn to my blog and I see most of my … Continue reading
“‘It must take so much discipline to be an artist,’ we are often told by well-meaning people who are not artists but wish they were. What a temptation. What a seduction. They’re inviting us to preen before an admiring audience, to act out the image that is so heroic and Spartan-and false. As artists, grounding … Continue reading
e.e. Cummings once said that “to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best- night and day- to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” Journaling is the greatest bulwark in this battle. Writing and reading, everyday, … Continue reading
The Blank-Faced Confidante 