12 Weeks in My Subconscious – A Review of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way

Is this Famous Spiritual Recovery Program Right for You?

What does it mean to go on a journey of spiritual recovery? That is the question Julia Cameron hopes to help you answer by following her 12-week self-help book/guide/lifestyle path The Artist’s Way. I just finished this 3-month journey yesterday and I want to talk about my experiences so that you can decide whether this

is something you should invest your time in – because while it is not a journey that I would advise everyone take, for a few reasons, there are people for whom this book could be life-changing.

Frustrated artists may pay particular attention, and I write this for anyone who struggles to find their groove artistically. (TL:DR to this long post: if you want to find your artistic groove but just need help building a set of tools, then this program could be the one, but doing this program only works if you put in a lot of work.)

The most important context to know about The Artist’s Way (TAW) is that it is not just a self-help book that you pick up, read, think about, and then put back on the shelf for the next time you have a question. This book is based on a 12-week in-person program that includes not only consistent daily and weekly commitments as well as weekly activities/questions that you are expected to complete (which in total can be 5-20 hours of work a week), but Julia also expects you to answer her questions and activities with a rigorous honesty that may uncover negative habits and influences in your life that hinder your creativity.

As part of this journey, you are then expected to change any habit or interaction that prevents you from living the more fully creative life that Julia outlines. Not only will you be asked to deal with the memories and trauma of your parents and early teachers not believing in you, but you’ll be expected to cut off anyone in your life who does not support you and your newfound creative mindset. Like I said, life-changing stuff.

I’ll talk a bit about my own journey, what worked and didn’t work for me, and help you decide if this is a journey that you should take. While I didn’t get as much from this as others might, for the right person, this could be everything they need to bootstrap a whole new life of creativity and art, and for that reason alone, this book is something special.

My Journey to Get Here

I heard about TAW in a few ways, including Tim Ferris’s podcast where he talks regularly about how important his Morning Pages are to him (more on those shortly), and then the book came up somewhere else and I picked it up last year sometime when I was feeling frustrated about not writing or playing music and just generally lying about in a mid-life crisis funk.

Whew, being middle-aged is hard.

Some context on my creative and recovery journeys to understand where I’m coming from. I started playing drums at 15 way back in the mid-1980s and it changed my life, and gave me a huge part of my personality and interests – I love rock music and rock drumming and have spent much of my life about that. I’ve played in many bands, recorded a few albums, and performed live dozens of times. I know Spotify is evil, but here are links to my prog and funk trios from the ‘90s if you’re interested. For all their faults, I’m proud of those albums.

But in the early ‘00s I decided to pivot my artistic endeavors and focus on writing novels. I had these ideas for books that kept filling up my head and I needed to get these things onto page, and so I did. From ’01 to ’06 I wrote 2.5 novels as well as 2 screenplays and now that I write that out, it’s almost a complete story a year. That’s pretty good. But that’s where that burst ends. (Well, I wrote another screenplay in ’09 that is also a hot mess.)

Two things hindered any more long-term writing projects for at least ten years: First, I started a family, which, in addition to my day job, took all my attention. Also, my ADHD really prevented me from sitting down and revising these works. I have one screenplay that I’m very proud of because I was able to sit with it long enough to complete a second draft and make sure all the names stay the same throughout (an issue with my first novel). I’m not exaggerating when I say that the idea of re-writing and revising a long-form story over and over again filled me with panic and terror. And so I would just go start a new project.

And eventually I stopped writing, pile of shitty first drafts piled high.

Over the next ten years – I swear I’ll keep this brief – I went to therapy to help with all my childhood ADHD traumas, moved around California and Oregon a few times, and eventually faced my biggest challenge yet – my alcoholism.

I bring this up now, in my first post for Substack, because TAW a recovery program based on Cameron’s own 12 step progress, and that my own recovery work helped me move forward on issues that other people may have never dealt with – those people are the ideal candidates for TAW.

And while I’ve had TAW sitting on my shelf for around a year, last fall after Trump’s reelection I had a very panicked moment where I realized that I needed to write books again, that the only real tool I had to fight authoritarianism was to reignite my passion for writing and start writing books like NOW, and so I did – I’ve been writing every day since early January and nearly every day since mid-November and it’s been amazing and transformative. (And this is before I saw this amazing TED talk by Amie McNee – go buy her book.)

This is all to say I had already done much of the inner work that Cameron and TAW helps artists and tackle in a meaningful way. But everyone comes to TAW from a different space and that if you are actively frustrated and blocked creatively then this book could do wonders.

This also means that, as someone actively in 12-step recovery, I already work hard at keeping an active relationship with God and I hold my spiritual well-being very high in my list of priorities. This is important to know because Cameron’s demands that a reader open oneself to a more spiritual life and that can be hard for some people to even conceptualize, let alone make a part of their daily work.

Whew – so much growth before breakfast.

So what is it about this book that makes it so successful? And how do you know if it’s right for you?

What worked for me – Committing Wholly to the Creative Act

The single most important element of TAW’s creative recovery program is that it pushes you, its reader, to commit wholly to creativity, art, and the spiritual relationship between the reader/artist and their art. Cameron forces hard conversations about all the excuses we make that get in the way making art and asks the very hard question, “why aren’t you committed to making art daily?” If you don’t already have a full and regular art practice, if you have a life too busy to make the art you want to make but also still dream of your creative life, if you are in a place in your life where you feel stuck creatively and find your own excuses exhausting, then TAW may change your life.

But only if you are willing to change your life. I know that sounds glib and patronizing, but it’s the cold hard truth and Cameron pulls no punches (and has a few moments where she is very patronizing herself) in her laying out what is necessary to build this creative life. If you truly want to make the changes necessary to rebuild your life as an artist, then only you can make that work.

Here’s a big caveat – the questions she asks may uncover the cold hard truth that you are fundamentally unhappy with your life and that the first thing you need to do is make a drastic change, like leaving a partner, changing jobs, or cutting out certain people from your life. Go and browse the /theartistsway subreddit and you’ll come across all types of drama that people encounter when they earnestly lean into TAW and the changes it asks of you. This is brilliant.

For better and worse, I have already had many hard conversations with myself last fall when I realized that a) I was now an empty-nester and had no excuses for not writing every day, b) my wife (the only person who needed to be on board with this) totally supported me making writing a daily priority for the rest of my life, and c) my current day job wasn’t crushing my soul with 30+ hours of meetings a week (like jobs I had from 2020-2023) and so I had the mental and emotion space to live my life in a sane and sustainable manner. I had no excuses not to write every day – so then what was stopping me?

If you have faded or blocked creative dreams and are uncertain about how to get out of your situation, if you need tools to support transitioning your life this way, if you need someone you don’t know to validate your frustrations and support your dreams, then TAW can be everything you need. Cameron is a firm but compassionate teacher who only seeks to unlock the hidden inner artist in us all. She has compiled this list of tools that she knows that work, and she has honed her voice and program through years of in-person programs to write a guide that, honestly, I really think we need more of.

That TAW is still relevant and important 30+ years after its publication is a testament to how powerful its program is. Even if everything in the book didn’t work for me, a few key tools were very helpful.

One of the key components (if not THE single most important component, aside from building a creative relationship with God) is actively participating in writing Morning Pages (MPs), which, as Cameron defines, mean sitting down and handwriting three pages, first thing every day, for the rest of your life. Now, truly, upon reflection and experience, exactly how you do your MPs is up to you, and I have come to tell people, “the only wrong way to do your Morning Pages is not to do them.”

Most importantly, doing my MPs changed my life because it gave me a framework to get myself writing every day. This is the recommendation for all artists, not just writers, but for me it was particularly important to create a habit and mindset that got me out of bed at 6am and writing every day. It’s now been 110+ days of writing every day and my life is changed dramatically for the better.

So this thing works.

Another part of her framework that really helped me un-stick is the firm but uncompromising language she gives to making art a priority above everything else. Like Steven Pressfield, Cameron has no time for your excuses and makes it clear that all of the inside language we use to make excuses for not making art are just that: excuses. Yes, she’s kind and compassionate and wants to help you heal, but if you’re not writing your MPs, then you’re not committed to actually changing. As a warrior-monk once said, “Do or do not, there is no try.”

It's so easy to bury our art in excuses from this modern world – I know, I’ve said them all. But to have another artist who has failed over and over but also picked herself up over and over tell you that you just have to keep going, that your excuses are useless – this is why her book is so successful. She has been there, she knows your excuses, and she doesn’t care.

Either do your MPs and change your life or don’t, but if you don’t then stop pretending this is important because only your actions speak now. It’s real talk and very important to hear.

Those are the elements that really worked for me, but, as I said, if you’re just starting your recovery journey there is much more in the book that may help kickstart your creative journey. However, like any self-help program, not everything worked for me and I did leave some parts of her program incomplete.

I Already Have Too Much To Do - What Didn’t Work for Me

Not that it matters, but I could have used a sticker or some other warning up front that, just like any class you might take, tells you the level of commitment needed up front. Of course, maybe fewer people would buy the book then, so maybe not. Regardless, this book asks a lot and it’s not clear up front how much time is needed.

This is truly a workshop with many, many activities, and she asks you to add anywhere from 5-20 hours of creative work to your week, depending on how thoroughly you engage with the Morning Pages, Artist’s Date, and the 5-10 weekly activities. I had nowhere near enough time to engage with all of the asks, the scope of which was not clear until I was a few weeks in.

The Artist’s Date (AD) is a weekly date you take yourself on (solo) for 1-2 hours where you get out of your daily grind and do something fun and special to pamper your inner artist. The guidelines that are given seem really impractical for someone like me (I’m not going to buy magazines to cut out pictures and build a collage of my dream home – do you know how expensive magazines are now?) but I did a few ADs where I sat and read a Tintin book from cover to cover and then played drums for a while, both of which are fun activities that I do not do enough of.

Going back to excuses for a minute – honestly, I have too much to do and am in the process of spinning down a couple of long-term commitments so that I can have more room to write. But that will take a while. In the meantime, I’m still a middle-aged adult, husband, father, son, brother, employee, and tax-payer, and frankly my life is always too damn busy. All of my extra time is going to writing these days – literally the one hour on Saturdays that I would take to go on my AD I’m writing this piece instead. That feels like the right trade-off.

So I couldn’t make the ADs work for me. There were also certain activities (such as the magazine-collage one above) that really showed that this book is literally from another century. I took a creative writing class in the late ‘90s and it was awesome, and many of these activities would fit very well into that class.

But I am working hard to do fewer things, not more, and just the additional 5 hours for writing MPs was jarring – to add another 10 hours of various activities was impractical at best and dumb at worst. Do I need to carve out more time for my artist? Absolutely. And the best way to do that is more time writing, like I’m doing right now.

And I think that guidance is both the best and worst thing about this program – it requires that you make fundamental changes to your life and asks many of the questions you need to answer to make those changes. But since it can’t be one-size-fits-all (nor do we want it to be), you have to adopt some of it to your personal circumstances, and sometimes Cameron makes you feel like a bad person for not conforming 100% to everything she says, even though that’s impossible for a book written last century.

How Stuck are You? - Is It for You?

Are you creatively stuck? Is the voice of your college art teacher saying you don’t have what it takes still loud in your head? Is your desire to create still there, deep inside, calling to you even though you don’t know how to help it? If you are in any situation similar to those, then TAW is definitely for you.

I like to think about recovery programs as providing the tools necessary to move your life in the direction you really want but don’t know how to find. And Cameron’s TAW has all the scaffolding and activities to get your mind and spirit unstuck, to get you the self-talk you need to know that the creative life is still available and ready for you, that there are others like you who got sidelined and are now lost but still yearn for dreaming and building.

But TAW is not to be taken lightly, either from the changes or time needed to do it right. Yes, you only have to take what works for you, but the baseline to get the fundamental value from the program is significant, and the only way to truly change your life is to take the actions necessary to actually do it. Not for the faint of heart, certainly.

Finally, there’s a quaint anachronistic quality about the program, asking you to just grab a pile of old magazines for a Saturday activity, and without any mention of social media (or even the Internet). The timelessness of the program and language certainly make it useful across many decades, but it sometimes takes work to figure out how to navigate all today’s distractions.

Like the best of us, sometimes its age shows, and that’s alright. When it hits, it hits hard and in all the right places. It changed my life. Maybe it can change yours.