Ask the Expert column: Julia Cameron
If someone already has small creative avenues, like they knit or sew for instance, how will using your tool kit help them to go deeper into their artistic expression?
I think that people tend to become more experimental. They try further venues for their creativity. They might even simply give themselves permission to work in a different color range. It’s an increased sense of freedom and exploration.
What can we do to help along the process of deepening our creativity while using the toolkit?
Have you talked about people using morning pages? * please see the very end of this email where I have cut from the original interview what she has to say about morning pages in detail.
How do you bridge the gap between using the tools and having your creativity open up and actually becoming more creative?
There really is no gap. Anybody working with creativity tools will experience a deepened creativity. When we experience a deepened creativity, we’re going to experience a brighter and livelier life. That in turn is going to make our family live more enjoyable.
What about that experience of a brighter and livelier life is more likely to make someone more experimental and more likely to open up more?
I think people become more comfortable in their own skin. I think people become more bold. I think people become less easily intimated by authority. I think their humor improves and all of those things tend to be reflected in daily choices.
For people who don’t do any traditionally creative forms of art - (she interrupted to correct me here - I was going to ask : For people who don’t do any traditionally creative forms of art, how can they use your toolkit to begin exploring those venues?)
I think that all of life is creative, and that there’s really no such thing as somebody living a non-creative life. And I think what my tools do is make anybody more comfortable with the fact that life is by definition more creative. So it may come out in their cooking, it may come out in their choice of kitchen curtain material, it may come out in a lot of traditional home making tools which are actually excellent venues for creativity.
Let’s say someone does not consider themselves creative and they suddenly gets a yearning to paint, for example. How can using the toolkit help them get to the point where they actually try painting?
I think just using the tool kit will get someone there.
I think when people work with my tool kit, they get much more open to what people call the “still small voice.” Creative awakening really is a spiritual awakening. Creativity takes faith, and faith opens up to us in small increments. You may want to say that morning pages are like praying on the page, and as we open up ourselves to out Creator, our creative automatically explains. It’s like coming into a divine inheritance. It’s always been ours, we just may not have known how to access it.
* from previous interview, to support the second new question above:
What does it do and why is it effective?
Well, I think a simple way to put it is that it’s an active form
of meditation. It’s a form of meditation and prayer simultaneously.
We don’t often think of creativity as being a spiritual issue,
but it is a spiritual issue. It takes faith to sew a 4H project. It
takes faith to cook Thanksgiving dinner. We don’t often realize
that any creative action is an act of faith and that therefore you
can support it through a spiritual action. And with morning pages in
a sense you are praying on the page. You’re saying this is what
I like, God; this is what I don’t like; this is what looks
useful to me. Even though you may not say God, you are addressing
something.
What will someone notice when they start writing morning pages?
They’ll immediately be much more present in the life they’ve
got. They will see that with many things that make them feel trapped
and depressed they have choices they’ve been ignoring and that
they can choose differently. Typically it will alter somebody’s
color sense, alter their sense of where to put furniture. It will alter
their dream life. If you have a longstanding problem like being overweight
or drinking or pill addiction, morning pages will tend to bring that
up and point it out so that a lot of people get rid of their addictions.
Morning pages tend to create optimism and realism. Virginia Wolfe said
that all artists needed a room of their own, and I always think, “Fine,
if you can afford it,” but morning pages are a sort of portable
room of your own. No one else reads them except for you. They tend
to make you have much more time during the day. It’s a paradox.
They seem to take time - they may take half an hour to 45 minutes to
do - but throughout the day you suddenly find yourself winning windows
of time. And that’s very important, particularly to women with
families who feel they do not have a minute to themselves, that they
have no time to think. I started doing morning pages myself when
I was a single working mother.