The Sound of Paper Read online

  The Sound of Paper

  by Julia Cameron

  Best known as the coauthor of The Artist's Way, creativity guru Cameron now offers a series of personal essays and exercises about working through creative droughts. She emphasizes the importance of acknowledging artist's blocks as a part of the creative process, but also "soldiering through" by continuing to show up "at the typewriter or the easel." In each essay, she invokes her own struggles to make time for creative work and avoid the traps set by the "inner censor." In "Getting at It," she writes that "[w]aiting for art to be easy, we make it hard. We take our emotional temperature and find ourselves below normal, lacking in resolve.... The truth is that getting at it makes it easier. Every day we write creates a habit of writing in us." In the exercise that follows, Cameron suggests that readers list five ways in which they have inched forward in a given day. Some pieces of advice are likely to resonate more with readers than others-and the author's straightforward message can seem one-note at times. But for novice artists looking for encouragement in an uninspired period, this volume could do the trick.

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  Copyright © 2004 by Julia Cameron

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts

  thereof, may not be reproduced in any

  form without permission.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cameron, Julia.

  The sound of paper : starting from scratch / Julia Cameron. :

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-58542-288-6

  1. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.). 2. Self-

  actualization (Psychology). I. Title.

  BF408.C1758 2004 2003061411

  153.3'5—dc22

  Printed in the United States of America 13579 10 8642

  This book is printed on acid-free paper. ® Book design by Marysarah Quinn

  This book is dedicated to Joel Fotinos,

  who has taught me to approach the changing seasons of my life with faith.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sophy Burnham, for her creative courage

  Elizabeth Cameron, for her loyalty

  Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, for her artful heart

  Sara Carder, for her meticulousness

  Carolina Casperson, for her belief

  Sonia Choquette, for her believing mirror

  James Dybas, for his generosity

  Joel Fotinos, for his faith

  Candice Fuhrman, for her support

  Natalie Goldberg, for her example

  Kelly Groves, for his enthusiasm

  H.O.F., for his artistry

  Linda Kahn, for her clarity

  Bill Lavallee, for his service

  Emma Lively, for her catalytic collaboration

  Larry Lonergan, for his vision

  Julianna McCarthy, for her creativity

  John Newland, for his lessons

  Bruce Pomahac, for his friendship

  Johanna Tani, for her care

  Jeremy Tarcher, for his leadership

  Edmund Towle, for his perspective

  INTRODUCTION

  The small book you hold in your hands was begun in a green eastern spring and written throughout a long, parched summer in New Mexico. It is intended as a creative compan­ion. Its essays are modest and gentle. Each is accompanied by a matching task, also modest and gentle. It is my belief that we make great strides in our creativity by taking little steps. Think of this book as a summer's hike through the New Mexico wilderness. You will gradually build stamina and savvy. One essay at a time, one task at a time, you will become more and more familiar with your own creative strengths.

  IN YOUR BACKPACK

  There are three creative tools that should be undertaken and con­tinued throughout your work with this book—and, I hope, far beyond.

  morning pages: Morning Pages are the pivotal tool of a successful creative life. They are three pages of longhand, morn­ing writing, about anything and everything. You may complain, whine, grumble, grieve. You may hope, celebrate, plan, plot. Noth­ing is too small or too large to be included. Everything is grist for the creative mill. Why should we do Morning Pages? Morning Pages prioritize our day. They render us present to the moment. They introduce us to an unsuspected inner strength and agility. They draw to our attention those areas of our life that need our focus. Both our weaknesses and our strengths will be gently revealed. Problems will be exposed, and solutions suggested.

  Morning Pages are a potent form of meditation for hyperactive Westerners. They amplify what spiritual seekers call "the still small voice." Work with the Morning Pages awakens our intuition. Syn-chronicity becomes a daily fact. We are more and more often in the right place at the right time. We know how to handle situations that once baffled us. In a very real sense, we become our own friend and witness. Morning Pages are the gateway to the inner and higher self. They bring us guidance and resilience. They make us farseeing. I have been doing Morning Pages for two decades now. Many of my students have used them a decade or longer. They are a portable, reliable, and friendly tool. Do Morning Pages daily.

  Artist dates: The Artist Date is the companion tool to Morning Pages. It is a once-a-week, festive outing undertaken and executed solo. As the name suggests, the tool involves self-romancing. On an Artist Date, we become intimate with our-selves, our hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Many students report that it was on an Artist Date that they first felt conscious contact with the Great Creator. An Artist Date is sacred time. It is time set aside to nurture our creative consciousness. In planning an Artist Date, think mystery rather than mastery. Think pleasure, not duty. Choose an expedition that enchants you, one that truly interests your inner explorer. In planning and executing Artist Dates, expect to encounter a certain amount of inner resistance. Despite seem­ing frivolous, the Artist Date is a serious tool for self-discovery. Commit yourself to overcoming your resistance. Take one Artist Date weekly.

  walks: The third pivotal creative tool is one that links to­gether mind and body. This tool is walking. Like the Morning I 'ages and the Artist Date, it is deceptively simple, yet very power-liil. A twenty-minute Walk is long enough. An additional hour's Walk once weekly is recommended. What does walking do? It nudges us out of our habitual thinking. It builds a bridge to higher consciousness. It allows us to access our intuition, to focus on solutions rather than problems. Try for two to three short Walks weekly, and one long one.

  Setting Off

  It is a bright and chill early spring day. The air is crisp but the earth is insistent. In Riverside Park, jonquils are in bloom wher­ever they are sheltered. On a slight and unshaded hill, purple cro­cuses push past frosty grass. Small bushes sprout tiny buds, some green-gold, some reddish-brown. The distant trees are misted by the lightest tincture of green, like a delicate Japanese watercolor. ' The wind is stiff and needling. It still feels like winter, but spring itself is positive and determined. Something is afoot, and it is festive and uncontrollable and undeniable. "Just wait and see," it says, but who wants to wait? Spring invites and invokes curiosity. Mine has been as insistent and pushy as the not-to-be-denied buds.

  This afternoo
n, scratching this itch, I took an Artist Date. I went to the Museum of Natural History and walked through an exhibit on pearls. My fellow viewers were as interesting as any of the glassed-in exhibits. There were fine old ladies, alert as tiny songbirds. There were sturdy, bespectacled teacherly types peering owlishly at the fine print. There were misplaced shoppers, strut­ting like peacocks, fingering their gaudy modern clothes and gaz­ing at the past century's finery. And there I was in the middle of them, a pale, wild-haired woman sporting real pearl earrings and wincing at the documentary that showed in gory detail exactly how cultured pearls are induced and harvested.

  As is often the case when I stick my nose into things, I learned

  more than I bargained for. I do not live well with excruciating detail. What I am after is "enough"—enough to set the writing gears going, which may not be very much. Sometimes just a pinch of information is enough. A case in point: Today I learned, in my learning about pearls, that pearls are what happen when an oyster or some other mollusk is irritated by the invasion of some dis­turbing intruder into its closed shell. An infinitesimal shrimp may get caught in an oyster and become the tiny intruder around which a pearl is built. A grain of sand may be slight but not too slight to cause a pearl to form. Pearls are layers and layers of sooth­ing "nacre" intended to insulate the delicate mollusk from the irri­tant that has abraded it. At root, a pearl is a "disturbance," a beauty caused by something that isn't supposed to be there, about which something needs to be done. It is the interruption of equilibrium that creates beauty. Beauty is a response to provocation, to intrusion. "How like art," I catch myself thinking. The pearl's beauty is made as a result of insult just as art is made as a response to something in our environment that fires us up, sparks us, causes us to think dif­ferently. The pearl, like art, must be catalyzed. And we, unlike the mollusk, can invite the disturbance that provokes us into art.

  Lately, I am trying to provoke myself into art—at the least I am trying to provoke myself into writing. I spent a hard winter writ­ing and rewriting a difficult book. That book, which may have turned out well after all, left me feeling stale and flat. I doubted I would ever have another book in me. I thought after thirty-five years of writing that maybe it was time to stop, that just maybe I had written enough—and a little more than enough by at least a book's worth. I wasn't exactly in despair—that would have taken too much energy. I was in cynicism, which is despair's more torpid sister.

  Cynicism lacks any real conviction. It doesn't like the game as it's being played, and so it spoils it. At bottom, cynicism is a cheap and shoddy response to a life we are afraid to love because it might, for a time, be painful. My writing life, for a time, had proved painful, and so I wanted a way to wriggle out of it and have some other life, exactly what, I wasn't sure. Let me tell you how writing snuck back in on me.

  First of all, I write daily. I do three pages of longhand morning writing, whether I am writing my "real" writing or not. The pages are not what I think of as writing. They are more my wake-up call, the pen-to-page that sends me into my day, with that day domewhat prioritized or at least freed from the gripes of yesterday. So, the three pages began sliding toward four pages and then toward five. This happened with disturbing regularity, and it happened because I wasn't writing—except those three pages. Next I began binge reading, another way to cozy up to words. I whipped through a half dozen books and found myself browsing on the Internet for excuses to order more. Before I knew it, I had spent three hun­dred dollars on books. I waited for their arrival—"same-day deliv­ery" here in Manhattan—like a ravenous dog. No, I wasn't writing and I wasn't going to write. I was just going to nose around a little and see what my other writer friends were up to, see if any of them still liked writing. One of them had told me not a month earlier that she had sworn off. Was she still on the wagon, I won­dered, or had words started to have their way with her again? Was she staggering to the page punch-drunk with a need to say some­thing, anything? Nothing gets a writer more off center than not writing, and she had certainly sounded crabby about her high-minded decision to "just be a person."

  The truth is that writing cannot really be given up any more than acting or music can. All that happens when you give up an art that you love—although you may hate it at the moment—is that you get one of those divorces where you are much too curious about your ex's love life. And so, while I toyed with the idea of never writing again or writing only music, I also knew enough to recognize that I already had the symptoms of recovery. There were the tell­tale extra pages tacked onto my Morning Pages. There were the stacks of books—all filled with words, glorious words—piling up next to my bed like a delicious mound of mental lingerie. There were those snoopy calls to other writers to see how they were doing with swearing off their affliction. Do I need to tell you that my on-the-wagon friend was writing again, "just a little"?

  Have you guessed that I am writing just a little too? I am, I am, and my excursions are intended to help me spill words onto the page a little more easily and happily. I have learned that if I take my artist on a date, it responds like any other sullen romantic interest. After a while, it stops sulking and it talks to me. It has ideas to share and so, like spatting lovers meeting "just for a moment," it shares a coquettish thought—just to get me interested. It asks a question that sets me to thinking, and soon, there we are, at it again.

  It has occurred to me that a book of questions is a conversation that I could enjoy having right now. I can feel myself being coaxed out of hiding and into a real dialogue. There are a great many questions I am often asked about creativity, and I have many ideas about how exactly they should be answered. Hence this book: a creative troubleshooting guide for those who have been put off their creativity.

  SETTING OFF

  Try this: Gather fifteen or twenty magazines with pictures. Purchase a large piece of poster board and some glue. Supply yourself with scissors and some tape. Set aside one hour. For the first half hour, pull images that speak to you from the magazines. You do not need to know why you connect to a certain image; it is enough that you do. For the second half hour, trim and paste your images onto the poster board. You are making a portrait of your con­sciousness at this point in time. What you see in your collage may surprise, delight, or even alarm you. Seeing is believing, and one picture is worth a thousand words. Using words, take to the page and describe your personal discoveries.

  Who, Me?

  Tonight I am going to a dinner party—a Manhattan dinner party, black dress optional, but perhaps expected. As a child, I read Vogue magazine and plotted to live in New York. New York, I thought, was where the grown-ups live. I still think that.

  Twelve years old, lying on the floor by the heating vent in the front hallway, underneath the curving banister that led upstairs. Supermodels were a new phenomenon—Verushka, Lauren Hut-ton, photo spreads in Africa with Peter Beard. Just Verushka and a stray lion, gazelle, hippopotamus. Nothing she wore could actually be worn, certainly not by a twelve-year-old or even by the adult that twelve-year-old might grow into, but what fun it was to look. Verushka painted blue like some wild African tribesman. Verushka, sleek as a panther, inclining herself on some low-lying bough.

  I don't know how many New Yorkers grew up somewhere else, dreaming of New York, but I did. I studied layouts of Chanel suits and Dior. I learned hemlines and hairstyles, the color of this year's acceptable nail lacquer and lipstick. I weighed tote bags and sunglasses, sandals and belts: the "right" accessories.

  New York meant much more than New York. It meant sophis­tication, taste, freedom, and accomplishment. It meant you had "made it" somehow, creatively, and that your life, a New Yorker's life, was chief among your creations. New Yorkers read The New Yorker and strolled through its pages in a William Hamilton car-

  toon. New Yorkers wrote for The Village Voice and answered dar­ing personal ads placed by daring city dwellers like themselves. New Yorkers were literate and stylish and up-to-the-minute. They had sav
oir faire, and knew what to wear and how to wear it. lor an adult New Yorker, a dinner party like tonight's was a snap. "Why, I'll just wear my black suit and my spangled black cardigan with the tiny jet beads."

  Somehow, although I have lived in New York off and on now for twenty years, I have never quite made it to "a New Yorker." Dinner parties like tonights, at the home of a chic Gourmet edi­tor, leave me wondering, "The black suit or the navy blue? (llearly an evening out, or a continuation of a busy day's look?" New Yorkers themselves strike me mute. They have country houses and manage to juggle rents and mortgages with a sleight of hand that still leaves me feeling uneasy.

  Of course, the magazines are still full of advice on how they manage it. New York is still the epicenter of the magazine pub­lishing world, and try as they may to include Des Moines's reader­ship in their far-flung net, it is still New York and New Yorkers that we read about. "Managing to swing that country house" is not a topic that a Des Moines reader needs to bone up on—but I still do. Curled in my reading chair, looking out at my New York view, I still read articles on how to be chic—New York—style—-with the same baffled avidity I did as a precocious child.

  Tonight's dinner party will feature live and in-the-flesh New York writers. I am one of them now.

  The Life of the Imagination

  WHO, ME?

  Try this: Each of us has a different idea of so­phistication. Each of us has certain items that speak to us as tokens of success. Sometimes in all our striving, we overlook treating ourselves symbolically in ways that match our accom­plishments. Take pen in hand and number from 1 to 25. List twenty-five things that represent to you sophistication and success. For example:

  Red nail polish

  A good writing implement

  Handsome business cards

  Enough socks

  Leather gloves

  Scanning over your list, select a symbolic something by which you can celebrate your soigne adulthood.

  It is a gray, dreary, and socked-in day, more like February than May. I am living in New York, on the farthest-west street in the city, right on the Hudson, but today is a day without bearings as the fog mists over the river and the Jersey shore beyond. It erases, too, nearby buildings and makes all of consciousness just this window into never-never land. I sit at this typewriter, tapping keys like Morse code across the murky landscape sending messages to... somewhere.