The Artist's Way

Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama
to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of
wholesale and often destructive change. Fantasizing about
pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time-or at
all.
Instead of writing three pages a day on a screenplay, we
prefer worrying about how we will have to move to
Hollywood if the script gets bought. Which it can’t anyway
since we are too busy worrying about selling it to write it.
Instead of checking into a life-drawing class at the local
culture center, we buy Art Forum and remind ourselves that
our stuff is not in style. How can it be? It doesn’t exist yet!
Instead of clearing out the little room off the kitchen so
that we will have a place to work on our pottery, we
complain about needing a studio—a complaint that we
ourselves cannot take seriously since we do not have any
work to argue our case.
Indulging ourselves in a frantic fantasy of what our life
would look like if we were real artists, we fail to see the
many small creative changes that we could make at this very
moment. This kind of look-at-the-big-picture thinking
ignores the fact that a creative life is grounded on many,
many small steps and very, very few large leaps.
Rather than take a scary baby step toward our dreams, we
rush to the edge of the cliff and then stand there, quaking,
saying, “I can’t leap. I can’t. I can’t. ...”
No one is asking you to leap. That’s just drama, and, for
the purposes of a creative recovery, drama belongs on the