Writing - The Artist's Way

Mur Lafferty, the author and podcaster behind I Should Be Writing, the podcast for wannabe writers, is currently releasing a series of video podcasts about Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, a twelve-week course in 'Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self'.

I like courses, because they give you a framework and I thought that doing this along with ISBW would help me do it properly and not abandon. I decided to shell out the £15 for the book despite Lafferty's warning that it might be a little bit heavy on the whole spirituality side for the sceptics among us. I was quite concerned about this because sceptic is a bit of an understatement when it comes to my views on religion. And in fact it does irk me quite a lot when Julia Cameron tells that I will be able to connect with God better and that I will inspiration from it. But I decided I could live with being irked and it may be worth it.

The Artist's Way's method works on introspection a lot and it includes doing three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness journalling first thing every morning. I am very much hoping this will help me improve my phrasing and get rid of some of the stiffness in my writing which I discussed last week. Of course I'm using a notebook with lines stupidly close together so it's a lot of writing and it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to do - of course that probably wouldn't be a problem if I was able to get up a bit earlier or sacrifice my morning internet browsing to do my three pages. So far I've done most of my week-day morning pages at work during free periods or after work and I could feel the difference with the morning pages that I actually did first thing in the morning.

One thing I am worried about is that in doing this course and in getting ready for Script Frenzy next month (I'll be writing my script and organising events for the Frenzy, as I'm one of the London MLs), I will be so busy talking and thinking about writing that I won't actually do any writing. This has happened to me in the past, so I'll have to be careful to not let that repeat itself. It's going to be a challenge, but hopefully one that I can come out of as an improved writer.