Julia Cameron

Telling Secrets

April 13, 2010

My art practice involves too many secrets. Things I don’t want to share with anyone, things I don’t even want to admit to myself. Even bringing myself to admit that I wanted to paint in the first instance took over a year. It’s one of the greatest ironies of my existence that while anyone who knows my name can throw it into a search engine and see everything I create and share online I am incredibly guarded with people I know in (quote-unquote) ‘real life.’

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ISBW Does The Artist’s Way

February 17, 2010

This is just a quick note to let you know that Mur Lafferty and I Should Be Writing is going to be tackling The Artist’s Way creativity program as an online community. You can follow the group’s progress at the I Should Be Writing website (or subscribe via iTunes or at YouTube) and by joining the associated Facebook page.

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2010: Back To Work

February 1, 2010

It’s February, which, for me, means getting back to work. (In more ways than one.) I made a conscious decision to not produce online content throughout January. Infact during January I did a number of things that were completely novel for me. I actually went on a holiday. And what really struck me when I reflect upon that holiday is how much I actually wanted to create things.

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Silencing The Inner Critic

January 6, 2010
Thumbnail image for Silencing The Inner Critic

Your Inner Critic might, to the untrained eye, look like a fluffy adorable teddy bear… but we know better!

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When You Use Your Imagination You Literally Empty Your Mind

December 28, 2009

We tend to think, as a culture, that inaction – indeed sloth – is a bad thing. But what if it was necessary in the creation in art? Australian Playwright Michael Gow thinks this is the case. Here is an extract from his appearance on Radio National’s Spirit Of Things.

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Doubt, My Old Friend

December 12, 2009

I don’t do as much as I would like to. Infact I don’t even do as much as I intend to do. There’s this great inexplicable and hard-to-describe resistance that gnaws at me. I try to ignore it. It gets louder. I usually then procrastinate, play computer games, over-eat, over-sleep… But it doesn’t stand up to close scrunity. The voice inside me that says “You’ll never be able to do this” doesn’t make a lot of sense in the face of the understanding that I’ve usually done some version of the task before. Often numerous times. But, as Steve Pressfield notes in The War Of Art, it doesn’t have to make sense. It is an emotional impulse not a logical one.

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The Conditions For Creativity

November 13, 2009

For me, the conditions I require for creativity depend a lot on what it is exactly that I am creating. I can write just about anywhere – all I need is a pen and paper, though sometimes I’ll take my little netbook and type my thoughts out (it’s lovely and portable and has about 9 hours battery life).

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Morning Pages Revisited

August 12, 2009

In daily use the Morning Pages described in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way serve as brain drain. They help you take all the extraneous detail – the stuff that Cameron insists stands between you and your creativity – and put it on the page. On a daily basis this can be quite helpful, but what can we learn from the pages over time?

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