How I Feel After Finishing The Artist’s Way

I signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.

From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.

The writing habits class was my attempt at a recovery program. It ended up being exactly what I needed.

I started the class at the end of January and it ran for 12 weeks. The core of the class was working through The Artist’s Way as a group. I wrote a blog post whenever I reached the halfway mark and now that I’m actually more than a month out from having finished it all three months, I have some new insights to share.

The Artist’s Way works for you if you work it. Very similar to Al-Anon or any other 12-step recovery program, your biggest commitment isn’t to the homework tasks, it’s to believing that you’re worth it and giving yourself a fair shot to see what fits and what doesn’t. I don’t believe everyone ends up with the same story to tell at the end of the 12-weeks, for some people in my group the outcomes were more based on self-discovery and for others it was understanding that baby steps in the creative process make as much of a difference as giant leaps. My biggest outcome was detaching my creativity and writing habit from how I measure my self-worth. My identity as a writer is indisputable. I process my life by committing them to words and they help me understand who I am, what I’m thinking, and what I should do next. Whether I make another dollar writing or not, I will always need to write to understand myself.

Choosing to make writing a career requires that I set boundaries to keep my relationship to writing both healthy and fun. Up until going through The Artist’s Way I never had boundaries for my writing and definitely didn’t have strategies in place to embrace fun. Now I love working on my morning pages because it helps me realize that I have so many ideas (both good and bad) that I had never taken the time to listen to. The process also taught me that not protecting my creative time, not taking myself out on fun creative dates, and not giving myself a space to work for fear of taking up space, all of these were examples of how I was disrespecting and belittling my own work before anyone else could. Since January, I claimed a corner of our apartment as my own and on a weekly basis I either try to go on daily 20-minute walks or take an afternoon off to hang out alone doing something I consider fun (also known as artist’s dates).

It’s made a huge difference to know that it feels fun to take myself seriously. It’s that layer of fun that’s made my whole perspective shift and helped me feel more free as a writer.

Over the span of the course, I wrestled with how I link writing and money, or how much I struggle with giving my creativity the space it needs to evolve. I’ve spent my career trying to stuff it into a perfect box because I thought that was the only way to make it fruitful. Now, I have other ideas that I don’t think I would have had if I didn’t go through the course first. Turns out, I want to focus more on creativity as a vehicle for coping with hard things and there’s a seed in me that thinks it would be way more fun to be a children’s book author who helps kids understand big feelings are okay.

By the end of The Artist’s Way I deemed it a success because it helped me cultivate peace and a writing habit that didn’t suffocate me.

Keeping up what I’ve learned

While the above is a wonderful recap of where I was when I ended the 12-week workbook, I’m now a month out from then and I can tell you that it’s pretty hard to stay committed when you don’t have those weekly checkins or chapters to read.

This post is a recommitment of sorts to get back to daily morning pages, to prioritize artist’s dates, and to revisit the book whenever necessary. I notice how at ease I am whenever a combination of those three are a part of my creative diet and I’m not willing to lose the good feelings.

Have you ever worked through The Artist’s Way? Are you in the middle of it now or thinking of starting? I’d love to hear!