The Next Right Step

The Artist's Way Week Eight: Recovering a Sense of Strength

Week eight can be summed up thusly: Mourn your artistic losses and move on.

Easier said than done, of course. But—as is so often the way of these things—it’s also easier done than not done. In this week’s chapter, Cameron draws a lot of parallels between artistic suffering and the kinds of suffering that would be prefaced with trigger warnings if this book were being published for the first time in 2023, but what she’s basically saying is this: Artistic loss is fucking painful, but un-mourned artistic loss is really fucking painful.

But to work through that pain, writers first have to admit they’re feeling it. “Like the career of any athlete, an artist’s life will have its injuries,” Cameron writes. “These go with the game. The trick is to survive them, to learn how to let yourself heal. Just as a player who ignores a sore muscle may tear it further, an artist who buries his pain over losses will ultimately cripple himself into silence. Give yourself the dignity of admitting your artistic wounds. That is the first step in healing them.”

Let me kick us off by admitting how wounded I am that Cameron used a masculine reflexive pronoun in the quote above. Himself? Really? Es tu, Julia?

The next step in healing is to take action. “When faced with a loss, immediately take one small action to support your artist,” she writes. “Even if all you’re doing is buying a bunch of tulips and a sketch pad, your action says, I acknowledge you and your pain.”

So in my wounded-by-gendered-language example above, my one small action might be a copyedit: “Just as a player who ignores a sore muscle may tear it further, an artist ARTISTS who buries his BURY THEIR pain over losses will ultimately cripple himself THEMSELVES into silence.”

Yes, I do feel a little better, thank you!

We think artistic loss is painful because we’re being told we can’t have what we want—the agent rejects a novel, the magazine rejects a story, the subject refuses your interview request, your inner critic tells you today’s work was rubbish and on and on and on. But the rejection itself is only the tip of the painberg. Most artistic loss is painful because it just keeps coming and coming and coming. Most writers sending their work out into the world hear far more noes than yeses. Big noes. Little noes. Medium noes. All those noes keep coming and coming and coming. No one small no will break you, but collectively? If every no is a drop of water poured into a balloon, that balloon will soldier on, bravely swelling and swelling and swelling, until the day the next tiny drop is one drop too many, and the balloon bursts.

Maybe your burst balloon is an ugly cry.

Maybe it’s a lack of confidence.

Maybe—and I dearly hope this isn’t you—your burst balloon is a decision to turn your back on writing for good (though, if this is you, please reconsider—the world needs to hear your voice).

But if we throw out the balloon entirely and instead deal with each loss as it comes, we’ll feel the cold and damp of each droplet for a few moments, sure, but then it literally evaporates. And it’s much easier to take action if we’re not bracing for that balloon to burst.

It’s worth noting that Cameron is talking about a small action. Daily steps. Regular steps. But baby steps. “A creative life is grounded on many, many small steps and very, very few large leaps,” she says, referring to these tiny actions as “the next right thing.”

The next very small right thing, that is.

So don’t research agents when the next right step is to finish your book. Don’t sit down to finish your book when the next right step is to finish the current chapter. And don’t worry about chapters when the next right step is to write the next word and the next and the next.

So what about you?

What creative losses are you mourning right now? What’s your next right step? If, as Cameron says, “small actions lead us to larger movements in our creative lives,” what small action do you most need to take?

A Little Something Extra

If you thought I strained the balloon metaphor to bursting (HA! PUN!), Bruce Bennett talks about cumulative stresses much more poetically in his villanelle called “Spilled.” Here’s the first stanza:

It's not the liquid spreading on the floor,
A half a minute's labor with the mop;
It's everything you've ever spilled, and more.

For the full text of the poem, click here.