Thus we begin. After 12 weeks of following Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”, I’m turning it into a web log instead. She devised a method and tools for engaging creativity for artists that are frustrated, burnt out, discouraged and wasted. She calls the core of the method The Morning Pages. Every morning one writes three pages. It doesn’t matter what is written. It can be anything: a bunch of recipes, dreams, memories, anything. The main idea is to just go ahead and create something first thing in the morning. Anything.

Amazingly enough, it actually works. By taking on an attitude of uninhibited creation one eventually applies it to everything else. It’s just getting out there and making something happen. Too often artists will get caught up in the mind, having idea after idea and never doing anything about it. Artists get discouraged by past experiences and patterns and often give up. The Morning Pages force a person to go forward. They really do clear the way for lots of wonderful things.

The problem I had with writing of the paper is that my hand would get cramped up after a while. Probably the result of holding too many paintbrushes, pens and pencils for too long. Putting it on the computer makes it so much easier, and what a great vehicle for doing it a web log is. It was a good way to start but now it’s time to do it better.

So… three pages a day, every morning. It’s really pretty easy. It just takes about 20 minutes and then the rest of the day is much better. It becomes second nature to just go ahead with things. One is no longer stuck in the cycle of having great ideas and never implementing them, for whatever reason. And what an incredible bunch of reasons we come up with for never doing things! It’s too early, it’s too late, the sun is too bright, I stubbed my toe yesterday… the list goes on and on. When one goes through this procrastination all the time it becomes habitual. And then one is filled with regret for never having done all the things they could have.

Just three pages every day can change everything. I counted the words in my written pages and it turns out there are about 450 words in three pages of text for me. That’s about six paragraphs of typed text. Perhaps there’s a way to count the characters entered in this WordPress software, but it actually doesn’t really matter. This way I can just keep going and going if I want. I don’t get to the end of a page, and I don’t have to worry about fitting stuff in. Very nice.

And then there’s a spell checker. And I can add pictures. And quotes. And links. It’s amazing how much more can happen now. But it’s all about going forward. And it works. It doesn’t matter what is written as long as it actually happens. So, welcome to my online version of “The Artists Way”. I must warn you that I’m not really paying attention to what I’m writing. Just typing away here. Just filling the pages and going on and on and on. It’s a whole lot like life.