The Artist’s Way needs some updates

The Artist’s Way came out during my first year of college. I guess that’s why it feels like it’s been around my whole life. Maybe that also contributes to me attempting to work through it about every five to ten years because it feels like something I should do to have a meaningful art practice. I attempted it last year and got so bogged down in the morning pages that I never even made it to anything else. So running across this video by Mel Mitchell-Jackson was a revelation.

why we never finish the artists way

Those very pesky morning pages

As I said at the beginning I couldn’t get past the morning pages in this book on my most recent attempt and Mel had the same problem. They spent an hour and a half every day getting through the morning writing and my experience was similar. I’d start and stop and be working on it for half the day. Meanwhile, I was so busy trying to get the morning pages done, I never got to the actual work of building the creative habit.

I 100% agree with Mel when they say the writing is about building a habit of getting in touch with ourselves daily. For me that looks like spending about 30 minutes in the morning writing down my daily task list and a bit of meditation time to check in with myself physically and emotionally, then setting some intentions for my day. Some days, I get a lot of studio time. Some days, I don’t. But regardless, I set some intentions for how I want to live my best creative life given what I’m working with on any given day.

When I started in 2013 with my Make Something Every Day project, I set a goal of spending 20 minutes a day making something. That is the very creative habit these morning pages are trying to foster. Putting us in the position to be ready and able to make our art. The morning pages are A way to achieve that but they don’t have to be THE way.

Listen, I am a prolific journaler. I belong to a dedicated journaling community and I still say the morning pages suck. And since I spend so much time doing the very thing The Artist’s Way recommends it feels deeply weird to say morning pages suck. But here I am, containing multitudes I guess.

Too much, too many, too fast

The book is twelve lessons and they are supposed to be completed in twelve weeks which is too much material in a very compressed amount of time. Then each week has too many items to complete besides the morning pages and the artist’s date. And finally, moving through them in twelve weeks is probably too fast to build good habits. Mel is once again VERY right about how this is paced.

On one of my previous attempts to work my way through the book, I struggled under the weight of how many things there were to do in any given week. I immediately gave myself permission to pick and choose what I thought would work for me. I went for the things that I thought would be easy for me to accomplish with the thought of going back through at a later date to try the harder things once I had a few good habits in place.

Mel suggests breaking it up seasonally in three week chunks to dig in to the material. Then I saw someone commenting on Mel’s video suggesting a lesson a month instead of a lesson a week. And the way my whole entire being exhaled at how much ease that immediately let into the process.

Community

You’ve likely been around me enough to know at this point that I never stop banging the drum of finding your people. I have a few groups I enjoy community with and Mel’s is the newest one of them. I recently joined their Discord channel and it’s a delight of creative folks chatting and making and hanging out. Mel is spinning up an alternative to The Artist’s Way called The Hiker’s Way. (If you subscribe to Mel’s newsletter you can get Lesson 0 of The Hiker’s Way for free!!)

Real community, where we share wholeheartedly with each other, is the way forward, friends. This moment in this country is deeply fraught. We are all dealing with the fallout every day. Settling in and being with a group of people seeking to journey through life together is powerful stuff. Making our art in a place where we feel seen, heard, and recognized for our gifts makes it possible for us to keep going during these hard times. I want that for you. I want that for me. I want the ties we build to be bigger than this present moment. Please, go find your people if you are making art on your own.

Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit

I’m rereading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp right now. I bought a hard copy while we were in North Carolina last week. I previously read it on my Kindle and I’m just so bad at parsing nonfiction on a screen that I can only say with confidence that I read it and there’s a story about how she starts her projects with a box and it involves a chickens-scratching-in-the-dirt metaphor. I think having that book on my reading pile at the moment is why seeing Mel’s video essay about The Artist’s Way hit me so hard.

I’m hoping that Creative Habit lands better with me than Artist’s Way. But I’m still in the early chapters. You know you can expect a blog about it when I finish reading it. I’m looking forward to spending time with it.

Ending on a positive note, again like Mel

A few years ago I wrote a whole series called How to Create Your Art Practice. I detail a lot of the things I did to get going at the beginning of my current artist practice. Bonus! It has lots of encouragement for you to get started in your own practice. I’m always open to hearing from readers about what they are working on or connecting on Bluesky. I hope your practice is terrific or you are encouraged by literally anything I say to get started creating yours. And I hope to see you in one of these communities!

Have you finished The Artist’s Way? Or not? I wanna hear your story about it!  Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.