The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Horrendous psychobabble Trojan horse pretending to be about creativity, but instead tries to convince you that you create through god's will.

Utter tripe. And dishonest too. Not a word of the heavy religious text element of this book is up front in the blurb, but you won't get very far at all without seeing quotes from prominent theologians and constant yammering about accepting God as the real creator through which you yourself can then create.

It's vile.

Edit:
I have never ever just thrown out a book. If I don't like a book I always find someone who might like it and give it to them, or take it to a charity shop. This is the first time I've thrown a book straight in the recycling bin.

I tried. I really did. But this was just not my cup of tea. I made it through about 5 weeks, then I finished reading the book to see what was coming. I realized I was not going to do the whole program.

This is very much a recovery book, complete with its 12 weeks. Each chapter/week is titled “Recovering a Sense of [something].” God and spirituality play a prominent role in this program. And this is all well and good for people who feel the need to recover their creativity. But there is a large sense of victimhood permeating it. She mentions tossing “a low self-worth shirt into the giveaway pile.” What does this even mean?

And with victimhood comes the idea that other people have been keeping us down all our lives and now it's finally time to be assertive and not let all of those people tell us who we are. In other words, it's time to be selfish, and start acting like a spoiled artist so we can become one.

We are urged to repeat the mantra, “Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong.” (What happens when nobody else treats you that way?) She feels sorrow for a man who wants a darkroom for himself, but instead his family buys a needed couch, and for another man who wants to vacation alone but knows it will hurt his wife's feelings. Because, this is all about treating the artist within as child, and “re-parenting” yourself. Who cares if that child becomes a spoiled brat?

There are a couple of good things I took away from it, the two things most people seem to take away from it: morning pages and the artist's date. But they don't need to have the spiritual recovery patina on them in order to work. Just use them to explore.

Overall this just wasn't for me. I'm more of a “Do the Work” kind of person, someone who believes “the muse” shows up because it knows where to find you: sitting at your desk or in your studio or wherever it is you sit your butt and work every day.

An eye-opener of a book. The danger lies in reading it, but not doing any of the activities within. I have yet to “read” this book in that sense; I haven't worked through a chapter a week actually doing the recommended exercises.

Working on it, though.