My amazing friend Alice told me last summer that she’d gone through The Artist’s Way, a twelve-week DIY course by Julia Cameron, and it was really helpful to her. Alice is a musician, and I’ve known her for many years, but that visit was the first time she was willing to play some of her original music for me. The cute husband gave me The Artist’s Way book for my birthday, and I started going through it with two of my very best friends this April. Among the various exercises and tasks assigned during the course, one piece of advice stuck out to me in last week’s reading. It said, “every day look to the Great Creator and say, “You take care of the quality, I will take care of the quantity.”
This is amazingly profound to me. I’ve said such things before – I will do the work and God will take care of the results. But there was something about that idea being put into such specific terms that clicked in my brain.
Normally, at the end of a first draft, I have a totally readable, coherent approximation of what I’d like to end up with. That makes the first draft really difficult to write, because I’m acting as if I know the characters and the main thrust of the book before I’ve started writing it. That isn’t how I work; I figure out what I want to write as I’m writing it. So, with my shiny new book project, I’m just writing everything that I might want to use in the actual book, creating a kind of pool of ideas and phrases that, in the second draft, I will mix and match and connect into a cohesive whole. But for now, I’m just writing with wild abandon anything that occurs to me that relates to the project. It is the most freeing exercise I’ve ever attempted. It makes so much more sense for the way I process and create.
I don’t know if The Artist’s Way is for everyone, but I will say this. The joy of being an artist, for me, is sitting down and making things. When I decide that I’m going to stop being concerned about whether the work is “important” or “profound” or “good,” I am free to just sit down and make things. Lots of things. So many things that I can’t help making a few beautiful things.
That reminds me of a Dave Schmeltzer sermon illustration. He mentioned a test of who could produce the best clay pot. One group was told to make just one pot over a time period. The second group was told to make as many pots as possible.
The second group ended up with the best looking pots, because they learned faster through repetition.