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Summary: The reviewer below (Berman) is the reason we need this book!
Review: The world is full of people who try their damndest to berate amateur creative people. Read the review by Richard J. Berman if you need to know what their voices sound like. The Artist's Way is full of blessings and encouragement, and it is an intimate portrait of one woman's journey toward some semblance of freedom. If you do the work, the blessings will come.
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Summary: An intensive self-examination course
Review: This 229-page book is actually a course to free your creativity. The entire course is based upon the principle that the artist must have faith to be creative. It is the author's conviction that the Creator encourages creativity in all people. The book is broken down into twelve weekly lessons. There are several miscellaneous sections. Each weekly lesson has tasks and exercises to be completed. Sidebars provide quotes and tidbits of information to uplift the soul. The divisions of the manual are as follow: In the introduction, the author explains how she began teaching and eventually developed her seminars and lectures into a book. Spiritual Electricity: The Basic Principles defines the ten spiritual principles, gives directions for using this course, and tells the reader what to expect from the course. The Basic Tools introduces the two primary tools of the course: the morning pages and the artist date. The morning pages are three handwritten pages, penned in stream-of-consciousness, without looking back at the previous pages. The artist date is time set aside to be spent with your inner artist. There is even a creativity contract. Week 1: Recovering a Sense of Safety deals with realizing what negative beliefs and hurts from the past are blocking or restricting your creativity and replacing them with positive affirmations. Week 2: Recovering a Sense of Identity begins with a section called "Going Sane." It deals with the people you surround yourself with in life and how they exert negative influence over your creativity. Week 3: Recovering a Sense of Power leaps right into anger management, shame, and dealing with criticism. It examines how most people are afraid that there is a God watching everything we do. Week 4: Recovering a Sense of Integrity is about learning to distinguish between the mask you wear for the public and your real inner feelings. There are exercises in learning what you really want from life and in sensory deprivation. Week 5: Recovering a Sense of Possibility begins with the following sentence: "One of the chief barriers to accepting God's generosity is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish." This lesson teaches us to break through those barriers. Week 6: Recovering a Sense of Abundance will have you tossing out clothing and gathering rocks. It teaches us that there is abundance in our lives and that our creativity requires its own portion of luxury. Week 7: Recovering a Sense of Connection covers jealousy, perfectionism, risk, and learning to listen to our inner artist. Week 8: Recovering a Sense of Strength teaches us to turn loss into gain by metabolizing the pain into energy. There is an exercise to help the artist break out of the early patterning; to overcome the negativity of childhood. Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion deals with avoiding self-defeat and learning to logically deal with fears. Week 10: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection enlightens us about the spiritual demons we create to battle our creativity: workaholism, fame, competition, and drought. Week 11: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy focuses on how to handle success, how to nurture the inner artist, and the connection between nurturing the inner artist and self-respect. Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith reminds us of the pitfalls to our creativity and helps us learn to have faith. The book ends with sections on questions and answers, creativity clusters, and forming a sacred circle. Every artist should own a copy of this book and utilize it religiously! It is the kind of manual that can be used over and over again for continual growth. I highly recommend it and feel it is a vital tool for personal creative expansion.
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Summary: A good start on the path to creativity...
Review: When I read this book I felt I had creative potential but my confidence in my creative ability was low. This book will not make you an 'artist.' However, this book may aid you in recognizing the points along the way that may have made something like being an artist, musician, writer, etc. unaccessible. The main thing to gain from this book is that it's all in your head, so unravel your bad experiences and get creating!
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Summary: Save a Tree: Avoid this Book
Review: This book came highly recommended by an old friend. I still haven't forgiven him. In brief: The Artist's Way promotes itself as a "spiritual path to higher creativity." The reality is far more mundane, as it mires down in tepid cliches, pointless affirmations and barely relevant inspirational quotes from obscure Asian mystics. The book follows a 12-week program designed to help writers, actors, artists and musicians get past their creative blocks and become productive creators. Once the cover is opened, however, I found a list of mind-numbing activities such as writing nasty letters to my third-grade art teacher who told me that I wasn't going to be the next Gauguin. And I felt like Richard Nixon when asked to prepare a list of all of the people who had wronged me as a child. Julia Cemeron believes that by acknowledging and confronting one's "creative enemies" one can become a successful and fulfilled artist, and the dominant theme of her book is spiritual "recovery." But the author is consumed by her own traumas and latent alcoholism, and seems to have written the book as a form of personal therapy. Good for her, but I'm not sure why The Artist's Way has become the EST of the new century. My suspicion is that it's a lot easier to make excuses than to create good art. Most of us have dozens of reasons why we can't be the next Picasso, Polanski or Pagannini, but in the end it all boils down to talent and hard work. The Artist's Way, although it purports to be a pathway to "recovering your creative self," is little more than a bundle of new-age aphorisms cloaked in the formality of an Alcoholics Anonymous program.
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Summary: Tough but worth it.
Review: We all have dreams that go unfulfilled, and it is usually because of laziness and giving into that unsavory side of ourselves that prefers to remain in the shadows than to bask in the sun. This book drags you out into the sun in all its resplendent glory, and blinding light. I say drags because once you are out it is difficult to not climb back into the shade. This is not a program for the feinthearted, nor for those looking to become overnight sensations; however, it will open doors to your true being, and inner capabilities that will amaze you. Good luck to all of you and remember to treat this like the serious program it is, and don't fluff it off. If the dates that she has planned bother you, then change them to fit your perspective, but never dismiss them. As much as it seems that the book is more foofy than substance, let yourself wander a bit. You'll be amazed what you'll start to find. Remember, you only get one chance at this life, make the best of it and become a great artist!
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Summary: Life changing experience
Review: This book will change your life! If you are about to buy it, go ahead! A new universe is waiting for you. It was the first creativity course that worked for me. I was very doubtful at the begining but continued with the lessons and tasks. After a month my entire life started changing. I recommend it to anyone, not artist only. It will open your mind and enhance your creativity.
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Summary: THE BEST EVER
Review: This is perhaps the most important book on creative writing that I have ever read. It might be wrong to classify this as merely a creative writing book. It is for everybody. The basic goal of the book is to help blocked creatives recover. Boy does it ever work! It is a 12 week program and I recomend doing it religiously. Now that I have done it, I do not know how I ever lived without my morning pages.
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Summary: Absolutely Incredible Journey
Review: This book was a key aspect of my own career transition. The morning pages alone brought such clarity and such freedom to my life! I highly recommend this book to ANYONE seeking more clarity about their own lives and their own creative process (remember, we each *create* our own reality), whether they consider themselves to be an "artist" or not.
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Summary: Three great big thumbs up
Review: The Artist's Way has allowed millions of aspiring and working musicians and artists to tap into their own creativity. This is a truly valuable self-help book which brings amazing results when you follow the step by step program. Unlock your creative energy and replace fear, guilt and other inhibiting forces with creativity, confidence and productivity.
This book will make you clever. Three big thumbs up from ...
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Summary: Don't let them keep you down
Review: If you find that you enjoy the company of people in art and music and just can't seem to get the courage to start painting, writing or singing yourself, then you need to read this book. It will teach you to trust yourself. It will teach you how to get out of your own way. Stop comparing yourself to the all time greats, they had to start somewhere too. If you are like me and have people in your life who do not serve as encouragement for you to be an artist, or downright tell you that your desire is silly, then you must read this book. It will change your life.
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