Recovery

Oh there’s no pulling the wool over your eyes, eh?

“I think the plan is to gather information now, find out who the characters are, and then write, write, write over July while I’m in England.”

No, you say, get on and write now. Caught procrastinating again!

*****
I’m reading ‘Floor Sample: a creative memoir’ by Julia Cameron. Yes, THAT Julia Cameron: Julia ‘Morning Pages’ Cameron, whose ‘artist date’ is an essential for when the well feels empty. Flicking through The Artist’s Way in my final year of my fine art degree rescued me from a horrible and lingering ‘I can’t do this’ crisis.

I’m about two thirds through it and I really can’t put it down. She’s fascinating. Brought up a catholic she sought “a personal God … I wanted a God as intense and personal as my spiritual questioning. I wanted a God who just plain liked me.” She had a doomed marriage to Martin Scorsese – doomed essentially because she was an undiagnosed alcoholic and admits “I confused alcoholism with creativity.” She got sober (of course it wasn’t as easy as I’m suggesting) and draws parallels between reliance on a higher power working to help bring sobriety as well as helping to bring other things, such as ideas. Told by her sober alcoholic friends to consider God her new employer, she should appeal to Him for ideas.

Now I don’t have a faith – not a religious faith at all – but I am aware that faith … in myself or my ability or something - is crucial to being able to write or make art. I guess you could call it ‘confidence’ or ‘self belief’ but I don’t, it’s most definitely faith – I have pretty much zero confidence in my creativity. I think it’s also the subconscious rather than an external being (not that God has to be external – maybe that’s why He’s different for everyone) but it’s made me think harder about asking for help for the things I want to solve.

It’s also made me realise that ‘on flicking through The Artist’s Way’ isn’t really good enough. I am going to try to do the twelve weeks course from start to finish.