‘The Artist’s Way’ Week 2: Roadblocks And Revelations
No one lives or works in a vacuum, and that’s certainly the case for artists. In the second week The Artist’s Way asks readers to consider the role other people can play in aiding—or stifling—one’s creative practices. Well, this is certainly an inconvenient time to be introspective about the wider world intruding into creative work. But this week’s readings were a helpful reminder of how much of an effect the people in your life can have.
This week the gang looked into our roadblocks, took trips to the museum and the coffeeshop and encouraged our Sims characters to try to date more. It’s all part of the process! (And speaking of process, if you’re not sure what’s happening here, find out more about why your buddies at Defector are blogging through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.)
As usual, we are answering the end-of-week reflection questions together here. If you’re joining us on this process, feel free to post your answers in the comments!
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you?
Sabrina Imbler: I am proud to say that I did my morning pages six out of seven days this week. I took Wednesday off because I had a hectic workday with a few interviews and a Q-and-A I needed to file. In general, I’m finding it much easier to do my morning pages now, although I think part of that is due to the fact that TikTok [was] banned and I have been denied my wake-up scroll time (I know this is embarrassing please don’t judge me!)
I’m still mostly journaling about what happened the day before, and even this makes me feel extremely accomplished. Maybe one day, 10 years from now, I will truly desire to know about the sale I got on Large Eggs at the grocery store! And I’m still finding the morning pages help clear my personal clutter before I get started on my workday.
Alex Sujong Laughlin: Congrats, Sabs! I did my morning pages all seven days this week. I was surprised to see a lot more self-doubt creeping in this week than the week before. I think this is because I showed some of the things I made during Week 1 to people, and I was suddenly suffering from a perception hangover. (Perception hangovers are what I call it when I’ve showed myself to someone and I feel extremely vulnerable and uncomfortable afterward, even if went fine.) My anxiety was also definitely VERY ramped up in this past week with the looming TikTok ban and the inauguration.
Chris Thompson: I missed one day this week. I spent Saturday night at a hotel and forgot my laptop. I did have a notebook in my bag but I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to do another three pages by hand. I feel a lot better about the pages now that I’m typing them. I even allowed myself to write out a couple of paragraphs of narrative, something that just was there inside my brain when I woke up Thursday morning. The only problem with doing my pages this way is there’s nothing for me to burn: I think I would hurl myself into a wood-chipper if another living soul ever laid eyes on the stuff I’m writing down. The least excruciating stuff is my griping about having nothing to say; it’s those times when I do have something that the stuff being recorded is unbearable. Alex, I’m blown away that you are showing your stuff to other people.
Alex: I mean, to be clear, the stuff I’m showing to people is like, a podcast pilot I was excited about but immediately was like, “Ugh, this is so cringe and horrible.”
Kathryn Xu: I did my morning pages six days this week, and even though it wasn’t that much of an improvement over my past week, it felt like it, somehow. I think I got a little less strict with the length, and approached some mornings with the attitude of “something is better than nothing,” and I just needed that impetus to begin. All of my content is still firmly in the journaling realm of things. I’m not super organized with a lot of my writing, but I like having a lot of my work in one place, and don’t like starting something or working on something in an entirely different medium/location. But maybe that’s something to just get over!
Ray Ratto: I did all seven days, and the experience was, well, kind of blah. It still feels like exercise rather than revelation, which doesn’t surprise me all that much because that’s how I tackle writing in general. Writing for its own sake has never been a thing I do, so I’m still trying to break decades of programming that way. This may take awhile, or it may never happen, but we forge on.
Did you do your artist date this week? Remember that artist dates are a necessary frivolity. What did you do? How did it feel?
Sabrina: I had initially planned on going for a nature walk, but last week was unusually hectic and when the weekend came I felt too depleted to leave the house. So I decided my artist’s date this week would be to play The Sims 4. I don’t know if this really qualifies as an artist’s date, but I did it alone and had an amazing time and felt my brain relax and also buzz a little as I watched my Sims’ little and big dramas unfold.
I’m currently playing with two Sims that are siblings, one of whom has a life goal of becoming a painter. In the past, I would just have her paint all day to level up her skill until she was burned out and then play computer games until she was having fun again, and focus on her brother, whose life goal is going on a lot of dates and is therefore more fun for me to play. This time I felt incredibly guilty forcing my painting Sim to paint while her brother was out on the town macking on NPCs, so I tried to take my painting Sim out on the town to find love. Unfortunately there was no one she was attracted to, and she felt mired in discomfort because she didn’t like the bohemian style of her going-out clothes. I could not figure out how to make her happy at the club—her brother was happily making out with a stranger—so I eventually made her go back home to paint, where she was happy again. There’s probably a lesson in this. Exercising your creativity is work, but depriving yourself of that work can feel just as exhausting as doing too much of it. And the club is not for everyone.
Chris: Sabs, my mind is reeling.
Alex: I’m obsessed with the drama of your Sims. And also I think that totally counts as an artist date! I did a couple things this week that I’d consider artist dates, but the one I think I’ll officially mark down is that I spent most of Sunday at a collaborative callback for a play I decided to audition for? It was with this experimental theater company in my city and it was so unbelievably challenging for me in a way I found both thrilling and terrifying. It was a lot of rolling on the floor, making shapes with our bodies, and finding ways to connect with the other people in the space in vulnerable and sincere ways. I am very comfortable being vulnerable through a screen, but physical vulnerability and intimacy are truly terrifying for me. Good news: I got a part in the play, so the adventures in embodiment and intimacy will continue!
Chris: Whoa! Congratulations, Alex! That’s very brave and cool of you.
Kathryn: Alex, that’s so fun, and one of the things about college classes that I miss. I did a stint of community theater when I was a kid, and was a semi-competitive swimmer for a period of time, and then basically stopped doing structured activities that required thinking too much about bodily mechanics. And then in college I wound up taking a semi-playwriting class that involved doing exercises like rolling around on the floor, and another theater class that took us to this dance studio for a day, and I had a very similar reaction to you.
Chris: My artist date this week was nowhere near as exciting as Alex’s—certainly there was no rolling on the floor—but I made it to a local bookstore, where I grabbed some books and sat in a big comfy chair and, you know, read. This was supposed to go on for 90 minutes but about halfway through I remembered that I am supposed to be helping review internship candidates, so I took my stuff over to a cafe table and spent the rest of the time reading résumés and clips. I want to include this portion of the trip in the artist date, because reading clips is so fun for me and I love doing it, and I do find myself inspired by the writing of our applicants.
Saturday afternoon I also went to the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C., and spent an hour or so on the second floor, walking through selections from the museum’s permanent collection. This is always a great time, but since I was not alone for it I think I should not count it as an artist date. Also I did not set out to make it an artist date, which seems like an important detail.
Ray: I don’t know if this counts as an artist’s date, but I took a ferry ride just to ride the boat, and about halfway through it occurred to me that I was doing this only because Julia told me to. I didn’t need to ride the boat or particularly want to ride the boat, and I think the next time I ride the boat it will because I need to get somewhere on the other side of the water, as the gods intended. I tried hard to imagine what I should be doing, and instead mostly lamented that the bar on the boat wasn’t open yet. This too needs work.
Kathryn: I also did an artist date, and it was very similar to the first part of Chris’s. I went to the really nice coffee shop right at the corner by my apartment that I always visit, but rarely stay in. This is partially because it’s a pretty small space that isn’t built for prolonged stays—there are tables and seating via a large ledge by the windows, but no wifi or real chairs—and partially because it’s usually a workday, and I like to tie coffeeshop stays with a longer walk. The only times I usually hang out inside are when I share one of the really nice pourovers with a friend.
But this Sunday, when there was supposed to be snow but it was above freezing in Philly, and so wound up being graupel, I decided I was going to go in there and read. I considered getting one of the pourovers for myself but I can never really justify paying $12 for a coffee, so instead I got my normal oat milk cappuccino (I am lactose intolerant) and peach danish and read the copy of Spadework for a Palace one of my friends got me. I also engaged in the Patrick Redford activity of writing down new words I encountered—my favorite so far this year is “peripatetic.” This is something that is really very obvious, but I always feel so much more inspired and compelled to write after reading. I’m currently playing through Cyberpunk 2077, a process that has been very fun considering how stressful I have found the entire process, but unlike reading, where afterward I want to read more and/or write, the post-Cyberpunk activity I engage in most is behaving like a Wikipedia freak in the fandom wiki and reading through build guides for the 15th time. I am happy, however, to engage in the important offsetting activities of “touching grass” and “actually reading.”
Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.
Sabrina: I’m still not quite sure how to articulate this, but I guess I did not come to The Artist’s Way feeling super creatively blocked. I am working on a second book right now, and I spent the first two weekends in January working on my book proposal, which was both exciting and also exhausting. I definitely have an inner critic and sometimes descend into self-doubt, but I feel like my primary obstacle as an artist is finding a way to do this work sustainably on top of my job here—to find that balance where I feel productive but still fresh. I never want to feel as burned-out as I did when I was working on my first book, because that burnout drove me to loathe the work, and to want to finish it quickly as opposed to creatively. So I’m also trying to engage with The Artist’s Way only in the ways that feel generative and exciting—morning pages and artist’s dates—but have been skipping a lot of the prompts because they can feel like work.
Chris: I’m glad to learn I’m not the only one who hasn’t been able to get to the prompts. I am doing The Artist’s Way not because I feel blocked, necessarily, but because I feel stagnant, and I am exhausted by my own set of tricks. That’s why banging out a couple of paragraphs of [really bad] storytelling felt like a little bit of a breakthrough: It’s at least exercising a different part of my brain. Or I hope it is.
Ray: I’m having trouble imagining this as a recovery issue. I’m not trying to recover from anything, as far as I know. Maybe something I need to recover from will occur to me at some point, but I feel like I’m looking too hard to find an issue that I don’t know I have, if I have it at all. God, I need some coffee.
Kathryn: I go back and forth on how much routine I want or need in my life, which is to say that I always feel great when I’m going to bed and waking up at the same time, and eating well, and have some element of structure, but am a big baby about actively implementing the structure. This is a very long-winded way of saying that somehow this week, possibly due to the Australian Open or trying to cut down on my caffeine consumption, I’ve completely managed to botch my sleep schedule to the point of it taking four hours to fall asleep for two nights straight. This is bad for obvious reasons, and also for the fact that it’s annoying. So! Something to iron out.
Alex: The prompts have also not been particularly generative for me, but what has been helpful is talking about the prompts and my responses to them with various people who are doing TAW with me right now (including all of you!). Otherwise, my big thing this week is that I’ve been paying attention to the ways the people in my life either encourage or discourage creative exploration. I’m really lucky that the majority of them encourage it, but I think all of my reflection this week has made me more sensitive to what it looks and feels like when there is a discouraging voice.
