"The Artist's Way"

Reading and re-reading "The Artist's Way" drives you insane after a little while. You start to look out at the world and imagine everything as a potential story. "What sort of creative risk am I avoiding right now?" you ask yourself, after waking up with a hangover and stumbling over to your computer. You go outside on the porch and write "Here I am, sitting on the porch. I am drinking tea," but somehow that doesn't seem like enough to carry a story. It just doesn't seem marketable. "EVERYTHING IS MARKETABLE!" screams the voice of Julia Cameron. "YOU'RE NOT TRYING HARD ENOUGH!! GO TAKE YOUR ARTIST'S CHILD FOR A WALK!"

So you go for a walk, looking at all the neighbor's foliage and imagining this as a story. Except it's not a story. It's just a motherfucking walk. "SOMETIMES OUR BEST IDEAS COME TO US DURING WALKS, NAVIGATING FREEWAYS OR SIMPLY SHOWERING!" says Julia. "Julia, I am taking a motherfucking walk and nothing is happening to me," you say back to her. Then, Zadie Smith interjects, "Uhm, excuse me Julia but bookwriting is a complicated and labor intensive skill. It actually makes me physically ill to think about it. I want to vomit right now because the words I just wrote down make me feel so anxious. Books take years." Julia and Zadie duke it out, and by the end of the walk, you never want to write another word.

A few days ago, I found myself at the Ballard Safeway at 2am with a friend. Two meth addicts walked in. "YES, FINALLY!" I thought to myself, like a terrible person. "A story!" I sat down by the empty and closed Starbucks and started writing on my notepad. "She looks like she's accepting an Academy Award made of Wheat Thins" I said re: first addict. Her accomplice, a greasy-haired man with burn marks up and down his arms, grabbed TV dinners and platters of hummus and vegetables and threw them into his shopping cart with the speed and fervor of a contestant on Supermarket Sweeps. They walked to the checkout counter like they were walking down a runway, like the whole world was a stage.

But I think it ended up not the best idea for a story, since I seem to lack that amazing body-and-soul transporting power real Novelists have. I can observe, I can write down details and moments. But as far as figuring out how these meth heads were actually FEELING about the Safeway? I've got nothing. I can tell you how I felt, but how did it feel for them to be the walking embodiment of a drug's desire? And that's how 'The Artist's Way' fails. Or, rather, why it's not enough. It can get you out of the house and on to the page, sure, but it can't make you into one of those amazing, perceptive people who just "gets" their characters. I think you actually just have to read a lot of books to learn this. Or live life. Or both. How do you do both?