The Artist's Way: 25th Anniversary Edition

Experiment with this two-step process: ask for answers in the evening; listen for answers in the morning. Be open to all help.

I want to sound a cautionary note here for all artists who put their creative lives into solely human hands. This can block your good.

For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction.

Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words—long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion.

For most artists, words are like tiny tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

We are tempted, always, to reverse cause and effect: “I was too crabby to write them,” instead of, “I didn’t write them so I am crabby.”

A well-meaning friend who constructively criticizes a beginning writer may very well end that writer.