On Getting a C+

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way consists of 12 chapters designed to help the reader recover his own Inner Artist.   A premise of the book is that few families and institutions know how to nurture the artistic soul, and that they often suppress a young artist’s creative instincts.  Chapter 1, Restoring a Sense of Safety, provides exercises to discover what Cameron calls The Enemy Within, core negative beliefs about being an artist.    A child may be taught these beliefs with the best of intentions (You can’t earn a living as an artist) or through uncaring criticism (You’re a terrible writer – stick to math).  Either way, understanding the source of these beliefs is the first step in eliminating them.

When I looked back to high school, I realize it never even occurred to me that I could be a professional writer even though English (and composition, in particular) was my best subject.    No one ever told me I couldn’t write … on the contrary, my essays and term papers were usually praised.  My choice to be a scientist was a product of two factors.  First, my father chose to join the Army during his senior years, foregoing engineering school … a decision he always regretted and told me about regularly.   And secondly, as the son of parents who’d seen the depression, I was going to college so I could have a profession and MAKE A GOOD LIVING.  In the late sixties, science was IN.  In spite of my grades in English, teachers and counselors pointed me toward engineering schools and I never thought twice.  And I did love science, too.  If I have any criticism of The Artist’s Way, it’s that it tends to imply that artistic creativity is the highest form of creativity and seems to be directed toward people who deep down wish they were an artist instead of whatever career they chose.   It took me a while to realize that my work as a scientist was highly creative, too, and that I could be a scientist as a vocation and a writer as an avocation.  Still, The Artist’s Way drew me back to the joy of writing, even in my work as a scientist.

One of the Chapter One exercises was to find an incident in my childhood that damaged my belief in myself as an artist.  Here’s mine.   When I was in sixth grade, one of our assignments was to write a short story.  Already a budding scientist, I wrote a science fiction story in which a boy traveled to another planet.   I remember very little from the story except that it ended with the boy waking up, sure it had been just a dream.  But when he got ready for school, there was a rock he’d found on the planet in his pants pocket.   I didn’t know that it was a device that had probably been used in millions of stories … I thought it was brilliant.   I remember putting the story between two pieces of orange construction paper and writing the title on the cover. I waited breathlessly when the stories were returned by the teacher and can still remember how crestfallen I was when I opened to the first page and saw this …………………………………………

Maybe that’s why I have trouble writing fiction.  Nah!!

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Tags: blogging, books, psychology, The Artist's Way, writing, writing and blogging

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