To be an artist, you don`t have to sell your sketches or publish your poems. To Julia Cameron-a journalist, screenwriter and teacher-everyone is an artist.
”There is no such thing as a person who is not creative,” says Cameron, in Chicago recently to promote her book, ”The Artist`s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” (Tarcher/Perigee Books, $12.95).
”Just as blood is a faculty of our physical body, creativity is a faculty of our spiritual and emotional body. When we exercise it, we feel good,” Cameron says.
But too often fear, guilt and insecurity keep women from making the most of their creative powers.
”The Artist`s Way” is about using creativity to enhance daily life.
Cameron aims to ”help people connect with an internal sense of safety and well-being that will empower them to say, `Yes, I can take that acting class` or `Yes, I can take that class in watercolor.”`
Everything from deciding what color curtains to hang in the living room, to dealing with work and relationship issues can benefit from flexing creativity.
The nuggets of advice in ”The Artist`s Way” are the same principles Cameron, 44, has espoused in creativity workshops for the past decade.
It`s a program to help you discover your creativity via exercises and quizzes on various aspects of well-being.
How do you get started? The process begins with what Cameron calls ”the morning pages” and ”the artist date.”
The first are three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing on anything. Your grocery list, weekend plans and why you`re mad at your sister are fair game. It should take about 15 minutes each day.
”The morning pages are about how you really think, how you really feel,” says Cameron, who lives in Taos, N. M., with her writer husband, Mark Bryan, and her daughter, Domenica, 16. ”By doing them, we become a lot less focused on problems in life and more focused on creative solutions.”
The ”artist date” is a weekly event that allows you to be alone with your creativity. Anything goes-a quiet walk in the woods, a trip to a museum. ”It`s a sacred sliver of time designed to fill your creative well with ideas, images and intuitions,” says Cameron.
Cameron says the morning pages and artist date can help spark a more adventurous, creative life.
”Perhaps you`ve always gone on family vacations to some place that you didn`t particularly like,” she says. ”Suddenly, you might say, `I`m going to let myself take that trip to the Southwest` or `I`m going to sign up through church for a theater junket in London.` You realize the same $600 spent going off to Michigan will allow you to have an adventure you may have dreamed about since you were a little kid.”
