Do you wish you could dance, but think you're a klutz? Did you dream of becoming a painter as a kid, but stopped drawing over the years? Or maybe you feel an urge to write, but are afraid of not measuring up. "Oh well," you may think, "I don't need to dance or write. My life is okay the way it is. Maybe when I'm older. Maybe later..."

Don't wait, says Julia Cameron, author, teacher and creator of the now famous "morning pages" exercise detailed in her 1992 best-seller The Artists Way. Her system of unleashing creativity is now taught at colleges and universities, and has spawned thousands of Artist Way clusters across the country.

Cameron tells delightful stories of students who have found a renewed youthfulness and zest for life because they have begun to write, or paint, or play an instrument. She herself has been prolific as a poet, novelist, playwright and filmmaker. She recently recorded an award-winning poetry CD entitled "This Earth," and has written a metaphysical musical, Avalon. She has also written for the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Vogue, and has served on numerous film faculties, including Northwestern University and Columbia College.

Cameron's newest books, released in January 1999, are The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life, and a novel, entitled The Dark Room. In an interview with Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema, Cameron talks about what it takes to unleash the writer within each of us, writing as a spiritual path, handling the inner critic and using morning pages.

 

RD:  Julia, you teach people how to unblock their creativity. But don't most people think they just aren't creative?

 

JC:  Yes. I think people have an artificially low ceiling on their creativity. They're positive there are areas they aren't good in, and then when we start nurturing the whole creative plant, most people come into a creative recovery. One woman may want to unblock herself as a painter, but six weeks into the creative process, she may find herself picking up the guitar. Or a man desperately wants to get songs for his CD, and seven weeks later, he's doing pottery and watercolor. You can't predict what you're going to unblock, but everybody is much larger than they think they are. I help people sort of re-pot themselves and get a bigger root system so they get more abundant foliage.

 

RD:  How does the process work?

 

JC:  I write, and show people how to write, what are called morning pages. Every morning, I get up and write three pages, of whatever comes up. It's an active form of meditation. If you're having trouble just sitting, this allows you to sit still and do something at the same time, and still achieve the kind of results you would out of meditation. Most of the time, it will be along the lines of "I didn't buy kitty litter. I forgot to call my sister back. I didn't like what happened in the meeting at the office yesterday." And then some thought comes through that can be remarkable. It's like any other meditation practice: you have this sweep of mundane thinking, and every once in a while, you'll have this little silver snake of thought that is a somehow higher, certainly different, feeling, thought or insight. And you notice it.

Writing is like any other meditation practice: every once in a while, you'll have a little silver snake of thought that is a somehow higher feeling or insight, among the mundane sweep of thoughts.

     In my writing process, I had the thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to write a musical?" And to me the answer was "Sure, if I were musical, it might be fun." But I didn't think I was musical. A little later, the thought was, "You will be writing radiant songs." And again my thought response was, "That's ridiculous." Then I came up to Boulder to visit Terrell Smith, and I was sitting by a little stream up on Lee Hill, and all of a sudden I heard this exquisite piece of lilting Celtic music, complete with lyrics, and I thought, "Oh, my God, I'll forget this, and I have no idea how to write it down." I ran up the hill, and Terrell said, "Sing it into a tape recorder." Over the next three months, I had 60 pieces of music come completely unbidden, and I didn't know how to do musical notation. So I made up an alphabet code that went from middle C, up an octave, down an octave, and I used plus or minus signs to indicate where it would fall. I wrote all this music out as alphabet, and it ended up becoming a musical about Merlin, called "Avalon." It's been produced once, and it's now moving toward animated film.

 

RD:  Our readers are going to be thinking, "Well, sure, you're Julia Cameron. You're multi-talented. But I'm a lowly shopkeeper in Westminster. It will never happen to me."

 

With this process, it's not that you re-invent the wheel, it's that you keep tilling the soil to greater benefit.

JC:  But you see, I thought the same thing with music. It was the one area where I would have told you I had absolutely no talent, just a great love. But at that point, I had been doing morning pages for 15 years, doing the same thing again and again, and getting deeper all the time. With this process, it's not that you re-invent the wheel, it's that you keep tilling the soil to greater benefit. I was shocked by my musical experience, but I had seen it happen to people I had taught. Someone would say, "I've always wanted to be a playwright, but I'm afraid to write," and six months later he or she would win a play writing contest. I knew there was some correlation between a dream and a wish, and an ability that needed to be excavated. Our great fear is "What if I want to do something, and I love it, but I have no talent for it?" I think that's asking the wrong question. The real question is, "What if I have the talent, but in this life, I have never had the courage to try it out?" I give people a tool kit that makes them feel safe enough to be a beginner, to do the baby steps and find their feet.

 

RD:  How did you come to write your novel, The Darkroom? 

 

JC:  The Darkroom was grounded in the story of one of my best friends, a famous gay pornographer who was compelled to go deeper and deeper into what some call the world of sexual addiction. We watched this man undo his life, and it was like watching a mountain coming apart in pieces during an avalanche. You see it happening, and there's nothing you can do. As he was dying, he sent me an envelope with his sexual history in it and a note that said, "Dear Julia, this has dominated my entire life. I have never been able to make anything from it. Perhaps you can." I didn't think I could, but I read the material. He had been incested, molested and lured, and then ultimately he had become a predator. I was saddened by it, but didn't see what I could do. About two months later, I was boarding an airplane, and a man's voice started talking in my head. I grabbed a pen and paper and started writing. In a period of about nine weeks, the entire draft of the novel came through me.

RD:  You were writing down essentially what you were hearing?

JC:  Yes.

RD:  I mean, you're not saying it's channeled?

JC:  No, I want to be very clear that I think all the tools I teach have to do with listening. When someone is painting well, they are listening to the painting. When someone is creating a character well, they are listening to the character. When someone is writing a good piece of non-fiction reporting, they are listening to the flow of facts. This is a different way to write than struggling to think something up, and it has to do with skills that are grounded in meditation, and with listening. When this character started speaking to me, I had 35 years of experience in how to stay tuned in to the character. Even so, an entire first person novel was more of a marathon as a listening experience. Getting up every day and reporting in and letting Elliott keep talking and not panicking over the density of the material, was no mean trick for me.

RD:  Would you read a passage that you like from The Darkroom into the tape?

JC:  I'm going to start at the beginning, because this is literally what I heard. I think it really should be read by Robert DeNiro or someone with a real male voice, but here we go.

     "I know that if I'm going to tell you this story, I'm going to have to give you the pictures. Pictures are hard for me, and some of them may be hard for you, too. That's only human. Let me start with an easy picture. Me. I'm 47 years old; black Irish, although you might say gray. Once at a cocktail bar in Las Vegas, a drunken waitress whispered to me, 'I know who you are.' I couldn't wait for her to tell me. And after a while, she did. 'Sean Connery,' she giggled. I laughed, too. If I looked like him, you'd think I'd know it. The guy I see in the mirror is my job. A homicide bull, 23 years with the force, over 6 feet, over 200, solid, nothing glamorous, at least to my eye. The glamour must have been the rented tuxedo I was wearing in Vegas for a friend's wedding.

     "Another picture: I'm in the stationhouse at my desk, in a room I experience as sound and smell. Too many phones. Too many computers. The smell of bad coffee and too many men in tight quarters. A police station isn't much like you see it on television. We don't usually have hookers in micro-miniskirts draped across our desks, or female undercover cops in their undies either. What we've got is a lot of paperwork, dirty ashtrays, dirty cups, and now that we've gone modern, Diet Coke cans and computer terminals. I've got seniority, and what passes as a corner office in a cop's life."

     When I started the book, it came through me very quickly, then I thought, "I'd better really research this," because it was so graphic and detailed. So I then talked to judges, regression therapists, incest survivors, sex criminals, all sorts of people for a while, and I found that I didn't need to change very much. When they said they were going to publish it, I found a New York homicide cop, a big black guy, and gave him the rough manuscript to read. He looks at me like, "So the chick thinks she can write cop? Oh, boy." So the cop sits there with this sort of smirk on his face. And then he gets quiet, and he gets really quiet. And he reads for like an hour and 15 minutes, just sitting there. And then he looks up at me and says, "How did you know?"

RD:  Could you talk about how the writing process actually works?

JC:  The process uses three pages of longhand as the bedrock of unlocking a sense of ease and self-compassion in writing. You get up in the morning, you have a pen and paper next to the bed, and you write three pages of longhand morning writing about absolutely anything. Those pages lay the inner movie onto the paper. The inner-movie is what we walk through the day watching. It's, "I'm worried about the car," "I can't believe I have to buy another toaster oven," "The cat looks really mangy," "I need to have more self-respect and speak up in this relationship." Whatever those thoughts may be, that's the inner movie, and that's what we're listening to as we move through the day. If I'm talking to you, I'm not entirely present, because clicking around in the back of my head is, "Oh, God, the eye drops for the cat," "I didn't buy the toaster oven," and on and on. If you put that on paper in the morning, you are rendered very present for any exchange that you have during the day. If you work with morning pages, you will find that you are much more alert and present, and ultimately more creative. 

     Art is essentially an image-using system. When you write morning pages, you take the images away from your eyes and put them on the page, so you're able to receive many more images just walking through the day. And I teach more tools. Once a week, you can go out alone and do something festive and experiential, and a little bit adventurous-anything from going to a Rand McNalley map store to taking a hike. The point is to do it by your self. This is putting images back in. People will say, "Julia, I was writing brilliantly and it dried up." And I will say, "It dried up because you were writing brilliantly." When you're writing brilliantly, you need to replenish your images, because you're using so many.

     We are not taught to write. We are taught how not to write. If you turn in a brilliant paper in school, with wonderful language and delicious imagery, and you take one detour you shouldn't have, you don't get the paper back with comments like, "Wonderful images, delicious imagery, interesting tangent." You get it back with, "You stray from the point, consider your use of the semi-colon." We also have a tremendous hierarchy about writing, where we say writing non-fiction is one thing, and it's very different from writing fiction, which is very different from writing songs. That's not true. It's all an act of listening: to a flow of facts, a character, a melody line.   

     But it all begins with listening. When you write your morning pages, your censor, your inner critic, will wake-up and say things like, "Oh, Ravi, you're so negative," or "Oh, Ravi, you're worried about this." You can learn to say, "Back off!" to your censor. But your censor never backs off for long. It's always in the background, doing pushups. Doing morning pages helps teach us how to keep the censor at bay.

RD:  You said earlier that writing is the most effective spiritual practice that you know. 

JC:  Writing has been my spiritual path, and I have seen it transform the lives of people I teach. They perform spiritual chiropractic, and mentally they work in much the same way that a steady practice of asanas does. You're just doing three pages of morning writing. You're just stretching your body, but everything is changing. This is simply the tool that is my path. 

     When you're writing morning pages, you're getting in touch with yourself, and that can either be a small "s" self or a large "S" Self. You come in contact with a source of inner guidance. You amplify the still, small voice. What has always been there, in the background, moves to the front. The guidance becomes insistent. People find that if they have a real block, the morning pages can release that block and let the energy and creativity flow.

If writing is an act of listening, it's almost none of our business anymore. We're just listening to hear what seems to want to be coming through.

     We always have this idea that there's some right place to begin. There's a wonderful line from Kabir, which is, "Wherever we are is the entry point." It's exactly the same thing with writing. We want to have the perfect beginning, and instead we just pick the pen up and we start. "I'm sitting at this table, the sun is glinting off the mountain," and I'm right there. So the first lesson is to begin where you are. The second thing is to think of writing as a listening act, instead of the act of making something up. When we think of writing as straining to be brilliant, when we try to do it perfectly, we become self-conscious. If writing is an act of listening, it's almost none of our business anymore. We're just listening to hear what seems to want to be coming through. It then becomes not a question of brilliance, but a question of accuracy: "Am I taking down exactly what I'm hearing?"

One block to writing is waiting to be in the mood. But writing is like a long-term relationship. Sometimes you won't want to have sex. And if you let yourself have the first nibble, you begin to be more interested.

     A third thing is waiting to be in the mood to write. But writing is a long-term relationship, and it's like any other long-term relationship. Sometimes you won't want to have sex. And if you let yourself have the first nibble, you begin to be more interested. And it's much the same way with writing. If you let yourself start, the writing develops a passionate impulse of its own to move through you. It has a momentum just like the sex drive. Getting sexually aroused will wake you up from a sound sleep, and energize you when you're tired. Writing does exactly the same thing for me. I think of creativity as a flow of spiritual energy that's always there, like electricity. When we wait to be in the mood to be creative, it makes as much sense as waiting to be in the mood to throw the light switch. The minute you throw the light switch, the energy is there. A lot of the tools I teach are, "Just throw the goddamn light switch and get on with it."

RD:  What are some other exercises you use?  

JC:  Sometimes people say, "I don't have time to write," so I tell them to buy five postcards for their friends and write on them. Suddenly, they have time for that. Here's another one from my book: "Writing is an act of self-cherishing. List 50 things you are proud of, from large to small." 

     Another tool is going back through your life and isolating what we call the creative monsters. These are the people who said, "With spelling like that, you'll never be able to write," or "Darling, are you sure you want to be a painter? Don't you need something practical to fall back on?"

     We need to dismantle our seriousness, to write just for the joy of writing, what I call laying track. Most people can get halfway through a project laying track, and then they'll hit a wall, where the ego says, "My God, I'm going to finish this. Someone's going to judge this. This better be good." The critic comes rearing up like Godzilla and people typically try to sort of muscle their way over the wall, with phrases like, "I am good enough. I am smart enough. I am writing well enough." That absolutely doesn't work. In those old 1940s prison movies, when the prisoners are trying to escape, as soon as they get over the wall they get the spotlights and machine guns. Instead, the way they escape is to burrow under the wall. When you reach the wall in your writing, instead of trying to convince yourself you're brilliant, you have to say, "I'm willing to write badly." The minute you have surrendered enough to be willing to write badly, you can finish your work. And when you're willing to write badly, you very often write very well. 

RD:  I think many people are hiding behind a mask, an act, sort of a sales pitch of who they think they ought to be. When they start to become more  authentic, like in the middle of a creative act, they may feel terrified. Do you have any suggestions for that?

JC:  Yes, write morning pages. Morning pages acquaint you with your shadow. They are like taking it out for a cup of coffee every morning.  If you do morning pages, you become really intimate with yourself. You become aware of how petty you are, how aggressive you are, how angry you are, how terrified you are, and you become much more comfortable with all of it. Once we become comfortable with our authentic selves, we can become comfortable with letting others see who we really are.

     Let's say you have a friend you have gone to the movies with for 10 years. He's always late. You are always standing in the lobby waiting. You always miss the previews. You always resent him. Three weeks into writing the morning pages, something starts to change. The next time you go to the movies and he's late, you walk into the theater alone. Afterwards he says, "Were you mad?" And you may say, "Yes. I've hated it for 10 years, and from now on I'm just going to the movies." There's no  pre-meditation. It's just an internal shift that manifests in more direct communication.

     When I teach creative writing, everybody reads each other's work, then comments only on the strengths. This is so difficult for us. We're all very good at telling each other what we don't like. But what we focus on is magnified. If you comment on a writer's weaknesses, they get magnified. If you comment on a writer's strengths, they will lean into the strength, and the weaknesses will tend to start to evaporate. A lot of what The Right to Write tries to do is create a container to allow a writer to become strong and confident enough, and then to take limited forays out into other creative endeavors. 

     In teaching this work, I found that I was unblocking a lot of people who wrote as well as people who were declared writers. It occurred to me we should therefore try and unblock everyone and let the chips fall where they may. For me, this was an anarchistic fling-open-the-door, give everybody some tools, let everyone write, and let's see if we don't get a wonderful garden.

RD:  Paint a picture for us. Imagine the world with people unblocked in their writing, expressing their visions and telling their stories. What would the world be like? 

JC:  When I teach, people come up and say, "I used your tools, and here's my first children's book." And they hand me a children's book. Or, "I used your tools, and here's my first collection of "S&M" fiction," or "I used your tools, and here's my first CD." I've had people give me feature films and say, "I got unblocked and I shot my first feature." It's like harvesting a garden. In a world where everyone was doing morning pages, and expressing themselves freely, I think we'd have a lot more love letters, more children's books, more self-publishing. I think we'd become more old-fashioned. I think we'd have better Christmas pageants at the local elementary school. I think we'd do clearer memos. I think people would use poetry a lot more as just a form of expression. I think writing would become much more of what it was, an integral part of life.