If you’re the kind of person who mocks The Artist’s Way—for its weird amount of God talk, its repeated commands to take yourself on dates, how author Julia Cameron recommends you walk around your yard gathering a rock and leaf collection—you should probably stop reading here. 

I must speak my peace and defend this book, now that I’ve completed its 12-week course and fully drunk the Kool-Aid.

I’m a creator cursed with snobby taste and toxic self-seriousness (is there another kind of self-seriousness?). These tendencies, both symptoms of overwhelming perfectionism, cripple my artistic impulses, as I learned long before I began The Artist’s Way. The pressure to be good, very good, or even great snuffs the candle out before the match is struck. 

So I clutched my sterling standards, heeded their promises of artistic integrity and critical success, but for that price they ransomed my free self-expression. Which is what I like to call a bum deal. 

When you were a child making things, you didn’t care so much what The New Yorker editors liked. That’s what The Artist’s Way claims, at least. Julia Cameron relentlessly calls you to your childhood self, creative and un-self-conscious and delighted in the act of making. She does this through many different exercises, the two most relentless of which are Morning Pages and Artist’s Dates. 

She also asks you to collect rocks and pieces of velvet, create an artistic altar, select a totem for said altar, dance out your frustrations, buy yourself your favorite childhood candy, and write yourself a letter from you as an eight-year-old. 

I took most of these exercises seriously but didn’t see results at first. I realized a few weeks in that I still wasn’t creating. In fact, at no point had Cameron asked me to do my art. I started psyching myself out, asking why I wasn’t compelled to create, despite dedicating myself to creative recovery a few hours a week. 

I kept expecting the sweet, shamanistic Julia Cameron to turn roast comic by the final week: “How much did you actually do your [insert chosen art form] as you followed The Artist’s Way? None? Well then, you just wasted $25, sucker. Have a nice life, and don’t forget to do Morning Pages until you’re dead.”

I continued even so. At Cameron’s behest, I wrote lists of favorite things, doodled, walked in nature, wrote a postcard to myself, and made a garish vision board. Whether through a few key exercises or the power of accumulation, I did—around Week 9—begin to turn a corner. 

My outlook on creativity brightened. I was far less scared and skeptical than I was cautious and curious. My resistance didn’t overpower me as it once had. I learned to study it, interrogate it, sneak past it. 

To wit: over three months Cameron tricked me into making a lot of things, albeit things outside my medium and meant to remain imperfect drafts forever. I wrote reams of Morning Pages, dozens of writing exercises for recovery purposes, an abandoned sonnet now completed, made two collages, aforementioned vision board, and the products of my Artist’s Dates, which include several pieces of graphic design, two digital houses, and four songs. 

Not a lot of writing in there, at least not the kind of writing I say I want to do. But Cameron’s is a generalist’s approach. Your medium doesn’t matter, and neither does the quality of your output. It matters that you’re making at all. 

There’s something terrifyingly humbling about that. It takes me out of my niche and into some amorphous sphere where I can’t pin a label on myself. Out here, I’m not a poet. Or maybe it’s that I am a poet, but I’m also a graphic designer, mixed media artist, songwriter, and interior designer. Which isn’t the best recipe for mastery, unless you’re a multihyphenate like Janelle Monae or the Olsen twins. 

Playing outside “my” genre is easy because the stakes are low. It doesn’t matter if I overcrowd my tiny house model with fake furniture or the folk song I mean to write ends up sounding like Blues Traveler. The attempt itself is pretty fun, and often I reach the flow state that recalls childhood’s creative playtime. 

However, my livelihood and my dreams depend on writing well. In this medium, I value mastery to the uttermost, but again, that’s part of what keeps me blocked. To that, I think Cameron would recommend writing badly anyway. What’s that? Here she comes: 

“We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly. Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success. Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled, smothered, despairing, bored. But yes, we do feel safe. And safety is a very expensive illusion.” (121)

In the same section (“Risk,” Week 7, great chapter) Cameron considers how working artists must learn comfort not only with failure but also repeated failure. It’s a theme throughout the book, of course. In fact—SPOILERS—failure creates tremendous artistic blockage. It’s the reason people find themselves in need of The Artist’s Way in the first place. 

Which is precisely why the childlike exercises may provoke such strong revulsion. Perhaps we associate childhood creativity with bad crayon drawings and misspelled poems. The last thing we want to do is regress. It sounds like a recipe for the failure we fear. We don’t want to indulge in silliness or meander our way around every medium from pottery to poetry until we’re lost in a sea of bad haikus and coffee mugs.

The goal is not to give your inner child the keys to your life or deliberately work against good taste. The goal is honest, boundless self-expression. If it takes a few hundred terrible haiku, Cameron argues, that’s a small price to pay compared with all the misery you’ll endure while blocked. 

Besides, other recovery models like therapy and Twelve Step groups rely on similar inner child work. It just sounds so much goofier in The Artist’s Way because Cameron leans into it so hard. So hard that you don’t just talk out your inner child stuff; you physicalize it through candy and throw pillows, which for most people sounds way extra.

But I think it kind of sort of works. Cameron claims that once your “inner artist” feels safe, she will create with you. With time, you can leverage that inner child’s boundless imagination and hunger for creative risk to get stuff done. Everyone wins. 

This book helped me identify my barriers to creative output, cut out distractions, expand my awareness, and make peace with my dreams. Then, on the final day of the course, I had the biggest creative breakthrough I’ve experienced in years. As of this writing, I’m still riding the high. 

I can’t claim that everyone who reads this book and does all the exercises will experience the same results. But I can—and will—still heartily recommend the book to anyone and everyone. At minimum, you’ll pay about $25 for three months’ worth of therapy. Which is what I like to call a plush deal.