A Little More Audacity, Please.

Shadow artists, inner critics, and lessons learned from one month of following The Artist's Way

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” - Anton Chekhov

Friends, my apologies for the radio silence this month. I’ll spare you the details, but in times of overwhelm and stress, sometimes it’s wisest to process offline. I’m grateful to have spent a few weeks tending to my life, powering through many end-of-the-year tasks, and resetting my mood so that I can greet you here, happy and recharged.

An enormous thank you to several new free and paid subscribers this month. Your support is deeply appreciated, and I’m so delighted you’re here.

I’m excited to bring you two posts this week (stay tuned for December’s Lifelong Learning interview on Thursday), and to share a little of the learning that has defined my holiday season.

About seven years ago, I was introduced to a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I can’t remember who recommended it to me or how I came to possess a copy, but in the years since, I’ve connected with many writers who have used Cameron’s work to jumpstart and explore their creative lives.

If you’re unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is a 12-week program of exercises meant to fuel creativity. It’s for folks who have buried or neglected their creative impulses, as well as those who simply want to expand them. The book has been a touchstone for well-known artists such as Alicia Keys and Elizabeth Gilbert, but for whatever reason, I simply haven’t made much use of it until now.

A month ago, I picked up a copy in my sister’s guestroom in San Francisco and found myself re-reading it with new eyes. In the weeks since, I have returned to it daily, allowing it to ground and soothe me through a hailstorm of life stressors.

Is it the end-all-be-all solution for ensuring we don’t die with our gifts still inside us (a quote I return to often from the book Choose Worry Over Wonder)? No. WE are the only solution to that problem. But books like The Artist’s Way are a helpful tool for folks with self-avoidant or self-sabotaging tendencies. In other words, those who have been avoiding the mirror. And it’s a particularly wonderful tool for this season as we reflect on 2024 and contemplate the year ahead.

Time to stop living as a shadow artist.

What is a shadow artist? You know the type. Julia Cameron defines shadow artists as those lacking the audacity to choose the creative path of their dreams. Maybe it’s someone who grew up in a household where the arts were not taken seriously or were relegated to fluffy extracurriculars. Maybe it’s someone who can’t justify using their time in service of something with no economic value. In any case, shadow artists are often held back by fear, choosing proximity or even parallel careers to what they most want to do.

Yikes. Reading about shadow artists was a gut punch. Cameron’s definition required me to check off more boxes than I liked, particularly the one about lacking audacity. For folks like me, whose fatal flaw is believing they can do everything themselves, audacity is hard. It requires saying what you want and making asks. It requires help.

If I could give any debut writer a single piece of advice, however, it would be to lean into unapologetic audacity. I’ve learned the hard way that humility does not sell books nor earn you medals and, likewise, that writing careers are propelled via community, reciprocal favors, and the audacity to dream up big visions for yourself.

The recovering perfectionists, eldest daughters, and service-oriented among us are not particularly well-versed in the audacious mindset. In fact, one might not even recognize their shadow artist tendencies until going deep into this work.

Prioritize those morning pages.

The most well-known tenet of The Artist’s Way is, indisputably, the morning pages. Thirty minutes, three handwritten pages of daily stream of consciousness laid bare on the page. I wish I could tell you how it’s different than journaling, but after 30 days of religious practice at this, I still can’t. Some days, I write to recount the day before, some weird dream, a funny thing my kid said. Other days, I find myself in the heads of some fictitious characters, scripting a scene that could one day make its way into a novel. All I know is that I’ve NEVER been a faithful journaler. I’ve held onto at least 20 half-completed journals over the course of my life, but this is the first time I’ve returned to one daily. And the most surprising part: I’ve come to love it.

In fact, I feel off-kilter if I don’t get to the pages right away. I credit these pages for helping me work through alternating feelings of indignance and uncertainty over the past month, for being a safe place to spew negativity (much better there than here!), and for helping me move past those feelings and back into a growth mindset.

There’s much dispute about how long it takes for a new habit to stick (most estimates lie between 21 and 66 days), but whatever that magic number is, I’m hopeful this one is here to stay well after this 12-week practice ends.

Artist Dates

Another fun tenet of The Artist’s Way? The weekly artist date. It’s no exaggeration that my most inspired writing has been the result of being with other writers, exploring the craft as a community, and saturating myself in the medium. I imagine this is why Cameron prioritizes the weekly artist date. However, a writer needn’t just immerse themselves in writing to grow as an artist. Cameron advises readers to explore diverse mediums on their artist dates: a trip to a nearby art gallery, a ceramics-making course, anything intriguing that perhaps creates a squirmy, slightly uncomfortable feeling inside your belly (yes, you will want to wrestle out of these dates. I speak from experience).

This is how I ended up at The Washington Ballet studio last week in an Intermediate Ballet class (intermediate, you might be wondering? Perhaps I possess more audacity than I give myself credit for??). It was a memorable experience, mainly because I was forced to eat a piece of advice I often repeat to my kids: “In any situation, it’s unlikely you’ll be the best in the room or the worst.” Walking this advice back because, in fact, in this particular class, I was The Worst. It’s not even a debatable matter.

As someone who danced regularly as a child and continues to exercise, I was stunned by the pace of the class. My feet were too slow for the rapid-fire round of frappes at the barre; my brain was too middle-aged to latch on to the choreography (this is an excuse. There were plenty of dancers older than me). All in all, it was a humbling experience, and as I stood at the barre and tried to pretend I wasn’t copying the 23-year-old in front of me (the one who could kick her leg up to her ear), I found myself SMILING, quite literally giggling at my ineptitude. In the end, I discovered I didn’t care that I was the worst. In fact, I’m a little proud of the title.

Not me.

Stop overthinking.

And that’s the point of this book: to help recovering artists get out of their heads. To start taking risks like we did when we were 8 and 10 years old, writing plays that we forced our family members to perform, and entering into a Stanley Kubrick period with the Hi-8 camcorder. Back then we were so generous with ourselves. Of course, what we were making was great! We never stopped to consider that it wasn’t.

As I close out these four weeks of The Artist’s Way and continue full steam ahead with this work, I’ll remind us all of something true and important: The world is full of critics, folks who will happily judge our work and our lives. We needn’t add our own names to that list.

When it comes to making art (or doing anything that brings us closer to our greatest contributions in life), we can also turn to the words of the legendary John Lewis, "If not us, then who? If not now, then when?"

Like others, I’m taking a bit of a sabbatical from the news these days. As part of this self-protective mode, I’m being especially choosy about the podcasts and books I pick up. Here are a few recent favorites:

Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown on Spotify: A book about feelings that goes waaaay beyond what we learned from our parents. And one best enjoyed via listening (for those of us with Spotify accounts, you can access it as part of your membership). Listening to Brené describe and contrast emotions has given me so much insight to use in conversation with my kids. I’ll probably listen to Chapter 7 (all about empathy) on repeat every few months. Highly recommend for the whole family.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: I decided I didn’t like this book after Chapter 1, and yet, WHY DID I KEEP READING? I trudged on, bewitched by something I couldn’t name, telling myself the whole time, “I’m just not a Sally Rooney person.” Humbled to be wrong again! It may have taken me more than a month to finish this book, but, oh, I deeply loved it. Rooney writes beautiful, real, suffering characters, and I couldn’t help but root for each one of them. Peter and Ivan are brothers with very little in common, mucking through the weeks and months after their father’s death, grieving in ways unknown to themselves. There’s an element of trying that Rooney taps into in this book - how hard it is to simply be human and how the only antidote is our relationships with one another. (Note: may require some Kleenex).