‘My own inner critic is a bully’: Julia Cameron on creative demons and updating The Artist’s Way

Mention the name Julia Cameron to an artist, actor, writer or creative and a reverential gasp will go up, followed by an outpouring of praise for her life-changing Morning Pages (MPs) practice. Cameron’s version of journalling became a word-of-mouth sensation with the publication of The Artist’s Way (1992). In this workbook, the now prolific author, poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright invites anyone wanting to unblock their creativity to follow her precise instructions: wake up, write what is on your mind, fill three A4 pages (no bigger, no smaller) in longhand, and then stop. Repeat every day.

With MPs, you’re not flexing for the next Anna Karenina, you’re getting rid of all the stuff clogging your mind, what actor and MPs fan Michaela Coel calls the “gunk”. It could be: “I forgot to buy kitty litter,” says Cameron, 76, on one of her many promotional videos, or a plan for revenge – also OK because: “You are becoming acquainted with all the dark corners of your psyche.” MPs are a “clearing exercise”, says Cameron. In Jungian terms: “You are meeting your shadow and taking it out for a cup of coffee.” When you get back to your day, or your desk, the gremlins of self-sabotage, distraction, fear and all the many negative thoughts that thwart creativity have been acknowledged and set aside.

All kinds of stellar achievers, from actor Reese Witherspoon and US self-help guru Tim Ferriss to pop star Olivia Rodrigo and writers Anna Burns and Elizabeth Gilbert are declared fans. So is her daughter Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, who practises MPs. Julia was married to Martin Scorsese in the 1970s – long enough for her to make substantive edits on the screenplay of Taxi Driver (1976). But while the fans have been doing their MPs, as well as using Cameron’s two other unlocking tools – walking alone twice a week and going on a solo Artist Date (visiting a gallery, say) – Cameron went quiet on us.

“I went 30 years silent,” she tells me from the wood-panelled library in her adobe home on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I was afraid.” From a global guru who long ago conquered alcohol and cocaine addiction, this admission is unsettling. What was she afraid of? “I was afraid of sounding too woo-woo. By that I mean, of taking a footstep off our rational path and talking about something that could only be known through intuition.” She is referring to guidance, a tool she briefly mentioned in The Artist’s Way and which she has been using ever since, but which, she says, “I kept secret.”

Now, with her new book, Living the Artist’s Way: an Intuitive Path to Creativity, she’s decided to explain how guidance works and, in doing so, to share the self-doubt she frequently experiences. “Guidance,” she writes, “is direction that comes from a higher source of wisdom than we ordinarily encounter,”’ or as she has said elsewhere, it’s about “Asking to hear and to trust that you have a source of inner wisdom”. Knowing that readers might think this all sounds woo-woo makes her feel vulnerable. But the evangelist in her wants to share her secret weapon, so she’s willing to take the risk.

As we talk and I try to nail this bestselling guru’s new tool, Cameron speaks as she writes: slowly and with deliberation. She repeats phrases and she comes at the same point from different directions. Cameron has been sober for 46 years. She writes prayers and spiritual poems and invokes the Serenity Prayer used in AA support circles. There is a sense when listening to this gentle soul that for her, every moment, thought and action is lived both with intention and in the knowledge that to step away from this path of learned resilience would be to step towards darkness and chaos. Repetition of words and phrases are incantatory: they mould the mind, they work on it like a salve, as do her almost devotional daily routines, which include walking with her Westie terrier, Lily.

The practice of guidance goes like this. “After you’ve done MPs, you’ve opened yourself up and that’s when you ask for guidance,” explains Cameron, “although you can ask for guidance at any time during the day.” When you “write for guidance”, you ask pointed questions about anything (“Romance, finance – no topic is taboo”), then you listen for the answers, which you write down. Later, you are encouraged to refer to them, which you are instructed never to do with MPs.

“The process of writing out our response is very important, because otherwise we ask for guidance, we hear it and we forget it. But if we have a written record of guidance, we can go back to it a couple of weeks later and say, ‘Oh, it was right!’” She refers to guidance in the second person, the guru seemingly invoking a deity or higher force. Later, when talking about how “we don’t want to talk about the higher power in definitive ways,” she tells me that she once addressed guidance directly. “I finally said, ‘Well, who are you?’ I was told, ‘We prefer to remain anonymous.’”

Cameron isn’t religious, though she was raised as a Catholic in the Chicago suburb where she grew up. “I thoroughly rejected Catholicism and I found that left me with a gap and I needed to believe in something. And so I found myself praying as if maybe there were a presence and, over time, I became convinced that there was. A turning point for me was when I got sober and was told I had to believe in something and I thought about it and decided that I believed in the line from Dylan Thomas – ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’ I thought, well, I can believe in that, in a creative energy underlining the universe.”

She taps into that energy and the Transcendentalists’ belief in the interconnectedness of all things. “Like right now I am sitting in my library and there is a good window that looks out on the mountains and looking at them gives me a sense of faith.” Faith is a habit, she says, a “spiritual muscle” that she has worked hard at. She loves to walk, mindful that all the creatures she and Lily encounter – bears, deer, coyotes, rabbits, snakes and the lizards that Lily longs to eat – “have their place”. As she walks, she “pays attention, finding in the now a sense of benevolence and optimism”.

Sometimes she writes for guidance on gritty stuff, like anger. For the new workbook she interviews people who practise MPs about their thoughts on guidance and its reach. One interviewee proved “troublesome”, however, and Cameron excises him from the book. “I asked for guidance,” she writes, and was promptly told: “‘You are correct to cut him from the book. He is arrogant and wants more credit than he is due.’ I thought of mailing him a dead mouse.”

Far from woo-woo, this is delicious, gloves-off fury. Cameron stands by it. “I think anger is a signal that we have a boundary,” she says. “As we work with our anger we find ourselves saying, ‘Oh, perhaps it was justified.’”

Nigel is someone else she locks horns with. Nigel is her inner critic and Cameron, an Anglophile, says that he “is a British interior decorator”, no gesture made to his imaginary nature. Nigel has been “hissing in her ear” since she started writing, aged 18. She writes at one point that, as a teacher, “I want to be brilliant,” which suggests Nigel has finally been hounded out. She shakes her head. “He’s alive and well. He continues to be critical and I continue to fight back and say to him, ‘Oh Nigel, thank you for sharing,’” and she does a simpering voice. “I get a little bit sarcastic back. Nigel is a bully and, like most bullies, if you stand up to him, he backs down.”

In the early days in New York, back when she was starting out and writing for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, she ran with a tough, egotistical crowd. Today, even though she is a self-help phenomenon, her own ego seems remarkably in check. “Again, it comes back down to sobriety,” she says, “and being told to let a higher force right through me. When I was told that, I said, what if it doesn’t want to?” She smiles at the recollection. “And they said, just try it, and I tried it, and my writing straightened out and I began to be useful and I found myself saying, ‘Oh, being useful is actually rather nice.’ I don’t think of myself as a self-help star. I think of myself as a helper.”

Living The Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Creativity by Julia Cameron is published by Souvenir Press at £18.99. Buy a copy for £16.52 from guardianbookshop.com