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

The way we refer to things matters, and blocked artists shouldn’t be regarded as lazy. It’s not laziness that stops the blocked artist but the inability to set achievable goals. Often, fear is at work rather than laziness. While art does require some degree of discipline, it also requires enthusiasm and wonder. Without those, art becomes a chore. Recovering blocked artists may find more comradery and sympathy from fellow blocked artists, and as a result when a blocked artist becomes more functional, they may miss the sympathy and do a creative U-turn that leaves them full of fear and shame once again. These U-turns are a natural part of the creative journey, but it’s important to know how to recover from them by asking for help from the right people. To break through other blocks, artists have to work through the barriers that limit them emotionally, namely anger and fear. Cameron offers an exercise to identify and work through those emotional barriers. The exercise includes five questions that aim to extract the artist’s angers and fears about the particular project they are working on. Since the questions ask the artist to focus on a single project instead of speaking in general terms, the exercise inspires concrete results.