How I Fell in Love with Creating Again

Or as I like to say: How I became besties with my inner artist :)

Looking purely at the numbers, this year was a total creative failure for me:

• I wrote 2 short stories. The entire year. Two. T W O.

• I went an entire 7 months without writing a single line of fiction.

• I aim to read 40 books every year, and this year I’ll be lucky if I squeak by with 26 (65% of my goal & how much I usually read).

• After a full year of regularly posting on SubStack, 0 of my 30 published posts reached a wide audience or brought in an influx of followers¹. (In fact, just typing that, I realized I almost have more published posts than followers!)

Despite all that, I consider 2024 to be my most successful creative year yet.

How does that make sense?

I want to give a shout out a little ole thing called The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron.

The Artist’s Way is a self-guided 12-week program full of exercises and explorations to help loosen up your artistic self. When I started it this spring, I felt burnt out from writing.

I had spent a wonderful six months connecting with writers in the UK, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that their creativity felt… different than mine. The group was constantly bursting with ideas. Everything that came out of their mouths or pens or keyboards was a freaking delight. Am I really as creative as these writers? I wondered to myself over and over. Am I as talented? As worthy? I even began to carry a journal around with me in an attempt to convince myself that yes, I was as creative as them.

…But was it working?

Then came May. I moved from the UK to Germany. I kept striking out in my attempts to find a writing community. My desire to create was at an all time low. It was clear to me—I needed to do something to jump start my creativity and wrestle with my imposter syndrome.

It was then that I remembered my dear friend Natalya from my US writing group had mentioned The Artist’s Way a few times in her handwritten letters to me. She talked of morning pages and artist dates, and I was intrigued by these strange concepts that seemingly helped her overcome her writing blocks.

My other two US writer friends,

Hayley E. Frerichs

and

Jules McLaughlin

, showed a desire to go through this program as well. Despite being 4,100 miles away from them and six hours ahead, I decided HECK YEAH WE CAN DO THIS, LET’S GO THROUGH THE PROGRAM TOGETHER! We could update each other through discord, lean on one another for accountability, and celebrate our breakthroughs.

And thus, from our respective corners of the world, we began The Artist’s Way.

what accountability partners are best for: accountability!

Now, on the other side of the program, I’d like to share my biggest takeaways and quotes that really resonated.

If you, like past-Paige from May, are wrestling with burn out or imposter syndrome or feeling a little lost and longing for the days when creativity effortlessly flowed from your fingertips… keep reading, friend. There is hope.

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Morning Pages and Artist Dates

Ah, the two pillars of The Artist’s Way.

Morning Pages are three pages you hand write every morning, stream-of-consciousness style. Cameron wrote that when people ask, "Why do we do Morning Pages?" she jokes, "To get to the other side." It’s supposed to connect us to our creativity, and often it helps clear all the gunk out that gets in the way. What I found helpful about Morning Pages was it reflected back to me how I was feeling. Then I had to make sense of that… and how I make sense of things is often with art.

Artist Dates were my personal favorite. Basically, they are an excursion, a play date that you preplan and protect against the other responsibilities of life. You were supposed to do at least one per week. You don’t take anyone on this Artist Date except you and your inner artist. It can be something big and extravagant (a concert, a museum, a nice dinner, etc.) or it can be small and simple (a walk in the park, binge watching a new show, painting a picture, etc.). As long as your inner artist is happy, you’re doing it right.

some of my favorite artist dates

Anton Chekhov once said, “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.”

If your reaction to having to do Morning Pages or Artist Dates is “But—” then I got some bad news for you: “If people are too busy to write Morning Pages, or too busy to take an Artist Date, they are probably too busy to hear the voice of authentic creative urges.”²

“The truth is that a creative life involves great swathes of attention.” (Week 2)

I’m grateful to have read Anne of Green Gables this summer because Anne’s utter obsession with the world around her opened my own eyes to the world around me. I constantly ask myself ‘What What Anne Shirley Do’ (#WWASD) and the answer? She’d look up, not down. She’d be drinking in the world around her. She’d constantly be daydreaming or working out little plots in her mind on the way to work.

Anne may have been surrounded by beauty from the natural world, but in cities like mine, people are my scenery. Whenever I go out in public, I look up, not down.

“Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play.” (Week 6)

As a kid, I created and drew and wrote and performed without a care in the world. It was as natural to me as my own heart beating in my chest. I was my #1 audience and my goal was fun. I somehow lost that, but I don’t know when. When did I become so critical? When did I start to treat my creativity as something that was “work” instead of “play”? Something to “consume” rather than “experience”?

“Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless. We discover that as we engage in a creativity recovery. ‘I felt like a kid,’ we may say after a satisfying Artist Date. Kids are not self-conscious, and once we are actually in the flow of our creativity, neither are we.”

This joy in creating has slowly been returning to me this year, and that, I consider, is the biggest win of 2024. The ability to play. I mean, I even started making vlogs here on SubStack! At first that felt silly. But then, as The Artist’s Way points out: “Silly is a defense our Wet Blanket adult uses to squelch our artist child.”

“Do not let your self-doubt turn into self-sabotage.” (Week 2)

We tend to call procrastination laziness when we should really call it what it is: fear.

I discovered that a lot of my blocks in writing came from a fear-based place. Naming it is half the battle—now I know what I’m actually up against here.

“Creativity lies not in the done but in doing.” (Week 8)

My inner artist’s favorite motto. This is what it’s all about, friend.

“The point of the work is the work.” We may think of artists as disciplined, but really what they are is a collective group of people who make a playdate with our inner artist, and then we show up and play! I’ve gotten into the ‘flow state’ countless time the last few months, and it reminds me why I love creating so much. I can’t believe I ever lost that.

“The stringent requirement of a sustained creative life is the humility to start again, to begin anew.” (Week 11)

In July, I sent this message to Hayley and Jules in the discord:

Talk about starting again. I haven’t written a novel since 2019, and I haven’t written a fantasy novel since I was in high school, 15+ years ago. Yet I’ve never had an idea PHYSICALLY SLAP ME ACROSS THE FACE the way that this one did. It happened as I was touring the Prague Castle (an Artist Date!) and for the remainder of the tour, my body was physically there, but my mind was in a made-up land, dreaming up my four main characters and their plots. By the time I left, I had 75% of my novel mapped out.

I’m convinced this never would’ve happened if I didn’t put in the work through this program. If I didn’t do my Morning Pages and show up for my inner artist with our weekly Artist Dates. Now, I’m closing out the year with 55,000 words of this novel written, and with more excitement than I’ve ever felt for a project before.

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So, sure, when looking at the numbers from the top of this point, one can argue that this year was a creative failure. But creativity shouldn’t be something we quantify. It should be something we feel, something we experience. Numbers can’t show these successes:

• I now daydream and people-watch constantly. (#WWASD) My mind is always working—my inner artist is always up there making a ruckus.

• I now understand my procrastination comes from fear, and the best way to overcome that is just start.

• I really freaking love writing and vlogging for SubStack!!! Whether a post gets 50 views or 50,000, I’ll still be smiling my way through writing my next post.

And, perhaps the best physical evidence of my growth lies in these two purchases that bookend 2024:

January 2024—I endured a rather brutal virtual critique from my US writing group. It was strange; I had gotten critiqued by them for six years and never had a critique sting me the way that that one did. Even now I can’t identify why.

Because I am a writer and therefore Very Dramatic, I sulked for days. I went through all my old stories and began to hate them all. I spent most of my time looking outside the windows at the gloomy skies that matched my mood (I was in the UK, after all) and asking myself, What’s the point? Why do I even do this? Of course I knew the point. It's because I love it, even though at times I felt I hated it.

So I went out, bought myself some writer earrings, and got back to writing.

December 2024—I was at a Christmas market in Vienna with my husband and we passed a toy hut. I popped in for funsies (perhaps my inner artist led me there…) and audibly GASPED as I came across a marble that looked exactly like a marble one of my characters in my fantasy novel carries around with her. “…a glass one with swirls of blue like a river running through it…” I paid 20 cents for it and skipped away, giggling. Now I keep it with me when I write to feel closer to my character. I get giddy when I think about how special it was for me to have come across this exact marble!

a gift as a necessary reminder that I love writing (L); a gift bought out of pure love for writing! (R)

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Please allow me to share one final quote from The Artist’s Way: “As an artist, I must be very careful to surround myself with people who nurture my artist.” I’m grateful for friends like Hayley, Jules, and Natalya, for pushing me to be the best creative I can be.

And thanks to YOU reading this absurdly long recap of The Artist’s Way. We’re all on our own creative journey, and I’m wishing you lots of joy, child-like wonder, and discovery on yours in 2025.

1. Instead, I have a very small but mighty following and I LOVE YOU ALL.

2. Transparency: I DID fall off Morning Pages and Artist Dates once I finished the program, but I am hoping to pick them back up in 2025. I am changing “Morning Pages” to “Daily Pages” though because let’s be real, for us night owls, waking up in the morning BEFORE work to write 3 pages stream-of-consciousness is, respectfully, a pipe dream.