Writing Through the Dark

The Artist's Way Week Twelve: Recovering a Sense of Faith

Week twelve of The Artist’s Way is really about weeks thirteen through weeks one-thousand-and-thirteen. In this chapter, Julia Cameron pulls all the writers who’ve emerged from from this program with a new—or renewed—writing practice in close and shares her advice on how to keep writing.

Really, it boils down to this: Be disciplined enough to keep writing even when—and maybe especially when—you’re feeling like you’re hitting dead ends.

“Creativity—like human life itself—begins in darkness,” Cameron writes. “All too often, we think only in terms of light: ‘And then the lightbulb went on, and I got it!’ It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of those flashes might be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.”

In a world where writers are constantly marketed programs that promise to help them write their novels with a 90-day paint-by-number precision, Cameron is quietly reminding us that writing really doesn’t work like that.

“Ideas, like stalactites and stalagmites, form in the dark inner cave of consciousness,” she writes. “They form in drips and drops, not by squared-off building blocks. We must learn to wait for an idea to hatch. Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.”

Basically, Cameron’s using a slew of metaphors to tell us to keep the faith, which might be fine advice for writers who are already confident, but for writers floundering in the deep end, being told to keep the faith can feel a little like Chad-the-lifeguard cheering from the edge of the pool: “Keep swimming, champ!!”

Not helpful, Chad! Not helpful at all!

So how do we keep the faith when we feel like we’re drowning but the world is full of Chads tossing bromides when we’d much rather be tossed , oh, say, a life raft??

First, it’s helpful to remember that we ourselves are the life rafts we looking for. If we stop thrashing and flip onto our backs, we’ll discover that our bodies are designed to bob at the surface quite beautifully. And sure, maybe our novel is the unkempt local pool that Timmy-the-jerk pisses in repeatedly, and we’d like nothing more than to climb out of the water, shower, and forget the whole sordid affair. But maybe once we’re on bobbing along on our backs we notice that we’re not actually floating in a pool at all but in a river with a gentle current that’s carrying us downstream. Suddenly, we’re realize our novel’s not a coming of age story set at the local pool but a thriller set on the banks of the Colorado River. Turns out all that thrashing in the pool wasn’t about drowning at all—it was our inner compass telling us that the stench of chlorine, the screaming laughter of kids, and the shrill whistles of the lifeguard were the wrong details for a story that needed the muddy smell of fresh water, the roar of rapids, and the screech of hawks circling overhead.

Once we realize we’re on that river, out hearts will hammer in our chests, not because we think we’re about to drown but because this, this, THIS is finally the story that ignites out spark!

Which is not to say your writing will be smooth sailing from here on out—writing the book is likely to be as bumpy a ride as that protagonist’s cruise down the rapids—but the next time you’re sure that you’re drowning, you’ll know that you’ve survived this before and you’ll stop thrashing and ask yourself, what’s not right on the river of your novel? And if no answer bubbles up immediately, you’ll know to flip onto your back and float around for a while because following the story worked so well before.

Early on in the pandemic, I spent forty days banging my head against a sticky widget in my novel. For me, banging my head against a problem of plot or character generally means producing page after page of longhand writing that keeps exploring possible answers to a series of questions that inevitably all start with two words: what if? If I’m being completely honest it also means a lot of staring off into space and growling, but your mileage may vary.

As if forty days of scribbling and growling wasn’t annoying enough, I happened to be doing all that scribbling and growling at exactly the moment everyone I knew was discovering that meme about how William Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the plague. Telling a writer in the middle of a 40-day growling marathon that Billy-the-Bard penned a masterpiece during his pandemic is about as helpful as a cheerleading lifeguard, but a funny thing happened on day forty-one.

That morning, I sat down to write fully expecting to bang my head against my book yet again, but instead I found myself in a scribbling frenzy, my hand only stopping forty minutes later when I’d finished a rough sketch of the outline for the sticky widget section of my book.

Forty minutes.

I blinked at the page, gobsmacked.

Had I really managed to unstick my sticky widget in just forty minutes?

The answer, of course, was no. Not in forty minutes, anyway. I’d been exploring dead ends for weeks before I sat down that morning—long enough that I’d started to doubt whether the novel was even viable. But “suddenly” I had a clear path forward—all it took was forty minutes…and forty days.

This breakthrough didn’t solve every problem in my novel, of course—book projects attract sticky widgets like knickknacks attract dust—but it did wonders for my confidence. Each time I encountered a new sticky widget, I reminded myself about my forty-days-and-forty-minutes breakthrough, told myself to be patient, then got back to work.

Having faith in our work, then, isn’t blindly believing the advice of an expert—even an expert as revered as Julia Cameron. Having faith is believing that the sum total of every good choice we’ve made in our writing means we’re likely to make good choices again. Having faith in our work means believing that every win is a tailwind pushing us to keep going, keep trying, keep improving. If creativity really does begin in darkness, as Cameron says it does, then having faith in our work means believing that we absolutely can drive our novels and essays and stories through the dark, dark night if we just keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.¹

So, how about you?

Are you and your writing joyriding in a convertible on a sunny afternoon right now, or are you driving deep into the night yearning for the coming dawn?

1. I should note that I include every part of the writing process in my definition of writing—freewriting, planning, research, writing, editing, thinking, growling—but that’s a post for another time.