Julia Cameron: It’s Never Too Late To Begin Again
Miriam Knight: Now, you say that it should be sort of stream of consciousness. Is there something that you use to pump prime this flow of words?
Julia Cameron: No, actually I find that when I say to people, “I want you to write three pages of stream of consciousness,” that very often they find the first page and a half pretty easy, and then they bump into an invisible wall. So I say, “Now, keep writing.” When they keep writing, they discover what I call pay dirt, and they begin to sort of dig more deeply into their psyches.
Miriam Knight: I’ve actually been trying this practice since I started reading this book in preparation for our interview, and I have to say I’ve found it amazing. So, you started this in your original book, The Artist’s Way. How many years ago was that?
Julia Cameron: I published The Artist’s Way in 1992, and since publishing it, some 4 million people have worked with the book, so that’s quite a long time and quite a large audience of people who were willing to experiment with the tools.
Miriam Knight: How does this book differ from the original Artist’s Way program?
Julia Cameron: Well, when I wrote The Artist’s Way, I found myself introducing people to the concepts that I felt would be useful to them. So, we had people digging into their own consciousness. And when I wrote this book I thought, “Well, I think we should talk about some concepts that haven’t been dealt with in The Artist’s Way,” for example, giddiness. Very often when people retire they experience a sense of giddiness, and they don’t know quite where to go next. And I found that I wanted to explore a sense of “now what?”
Miriam Knight: One of the next tools that you introduce in the book is called the artist’s date. I just love that. Explain that to our readers, please.
Julia Cameron: Well, when I wrote The Artist’s Way, I said there are two basic tools: they are morning pages, which are three pages of longhand morning writing about absolutely anything, and you do that every day. The second tool was something that I called the artist’s date, which was a once-a-week solo expedition to do something that was fun or interesting to sort of fill our souls. And I found that when people did artist’s dates they often came back and said, “Oh, now I get it,” that they had a sense of the benevolence of the universe that came to them from doing something as simple as assigned fun. I also found that when I assigned the tools, people would eagerly undertake the work of the morning pages, but they would find themselves balking at trying artist dates. I think that it was because they intuitively sensed that if they took an artist date, their consciousness was going to contact them with a lot of dreams.
