4-Week Guide to "The Artist's Way": Week 1

Are You Ready?

So this is how this is going to work. Every week:

I’ll consolidate 3 chapters of AW into 1
I’ll give an overview of my artist’s date
I’ll track the days I completed my morning pages
- To play along at home, you can share your log in the comments and everyday, I’ll start a thread in the subscriber chat where you can drop a ✅ if you completed your morning pages that day.

Morning Pages

✅✅✅✅ of 5 days - The day got away from on Sunday, but otherwise I’ve been on track!

Artist’s Date

I shared about my artist’s date in the guide to the tools of AW, which you can read here.

Chapters 1-3: Safety, Identity & Power

Ch. 1 Safety

One of the things about AW that some people find challenging is that there’s a lot of pop psychology in this book. Julia kicks off your creative recovery by identifying your parents as the source of your undernourished artistic spirit. But that’s not everybody’s story.

A lot of people may have had parents who would have loved to support their creativity but simply couldn’t afford to or spent so much time working to provide for their family, they didn’t get to shepherd their young ones in their artistic pursuits. Or maybe your family is one generation removed from poverty and you had parents that urged you to pursue a career they deemed as financially solid because they knew they would not have the resources to support you if you chose to become a professional artist.

Or maybe your parents were fully on board but you had a frenemy or a teacher or a romantic partner along the way that crushed your creative spirit.

The point is someone, somewhere along the way made you feel unsafe in your creativity. But wherever it all went off the rails, we can backtrack and recover that zest you once had for the arts. And you don’t have to dramatically pivot your entire life toward creativity — right now — you can simply invite it to take its place alongside everything else you love.

Even when I worked full time in sales/marketing/communications, no matter where I was living in the country I sought out community-based writing workshops and groups. I was always finding some small way to nourish myself as a writer. I may not have been writing (or even reading!) regularly, but I was able to what needed to be done to keep that spark flicking within me, until it could become the roaring flame of creativity at the center of my life that it is today.

So what happens to people who refuse to acknowledge the artist within? Julia says they become “shadow artists.”