The Artist's Way

I just started reading The Artist's Way book (or I guess doing The Artist's Way book), on the recommendation of a very dear friend. This is mostly an "if you'd like to join in or are otherwise interested, let me know" kind of post, but here's a few thoughts before I begin. (I think they sound more negative than I actually feel, but this is where my head is at!)

1. the author is INCREDIBLY confident in herself and her system, and I find this deeply offputting. I think she would say I am jealous and defensive or something, and I guess I am, in the sense that... being over-confident seems to work really well for her and other Confidence People? But I also think it's untrue, and I don't like believing things that aren't true? But also, it seems to work? I wish I had a better way to navigate this in life.
2. One part of that supreme self-confidence is that she feels 100% comfortable calling 1 hour a day for 12 weeks "just one hour a day, 7-10 hours per week". Lady, for most people that's probably 1/4 of their discretionary time for 1/4 of the year, that is a vast amount to ask of anyone. (Admittedly, it's possible that pitching it as "do it for an hour a day" gets people to actually do a quarter-hour a day, and that's enough. But I'm not sure).
3. Relatedly.... I get quite annoyed at people who are like "anyone who follows my program all the way through will benefit from it" when the program is deeply expensive, like this one. Yes, the people who choose to keep going with a very expensive activity are more likely to be benefitting from it, because people who don't are more likely to quit. Also, the people who felt it changed their lives are more likely to write you a letter than the people who felt it was a waste of their money. Come on! Does she actually believe her own hype?, I wish I knew. Humans seem very attracted to confidence, earned and unearned.
4. She does this thing I find awkward and unfortunate where she says "when choosing which exercises to do, first go for the ones you're very drawn to and also the ones you're deeply repulsed by, because we're often repulsed by the things we need most." This is awkward for me because I do actually believe we're often avoidant of the things we most need, AND ALSO we're often avoidant of things that are bad for us, and that convincing someone that they should approach the thing they're trying to avoid can either be i) very helpful and healthy, ii) entirely abusive, depending on some additional factors that I'm not smart enough to elucidate. To me, much of her book so far feels like a trap where she keeps saying "if what I'm about to tell you sounds hokey or stupid, that's a great sign!" and.... I don't know, I think that's actually a kind of manipulative technique, "if you're resistant to what I'm asking you to do, that's a sign you should keep doing it!" is a dangerous idea absent better care and context.
5. I'm not convinced that the problem she seems mainly targetted at (people who are creatively blocked because they think their work is bad or stupid, and/or that they don't "deserve" to be A Creative) is the problem I actually have myself. I guess she would say I'm making excuses or rejecting what I need (see above), but also... I don't know, a lot of the book feels aimed at a stereotypical 1950s businessman who thinks he has to be Serious all the time and that art is Frivolous, and that's simply not the world I live in, both in the narrow sense that I run in a very bobo crowd, and the wider sense that I think the adult world as a whole has become quite infantilised at the same time that there are fewer and fewer infants? (It's possible that this is one of those situations where an idea is so successful that it negates the context the idea was designed for, or it could be that the world just changed separately, I don't know).
6. I'm just gonna say.... I really don't think everyone in the world can be a full-time professional creative, I think you mostly do need a rich spouse or parent (or former self) to do it full-time. I'm not 100% sure about this, and maybe more people could be professional creatives if they fully believed in themselves, but it feels like snake-oil to me, at a fundamental economic level. "If God watched over all of us, who'd be left to pick the cotton and cut the cane?", wrote one of Coetzee's narrators (as I recall it, anyway), which seems apt because The Artist's Way author is obsessed with the idea that creativity is about channeling God, The Creator.
7. all this said, I do find some of the ideas in the book quite appealing! The idea of writing whatever's in your head for 3 pages each morning seems promising to me as a way to un-gunk the mental tubes, in much the same way that (sorry) I think of this blog as method of ungunking my mental tubes. I also just think it's hard to maintain the right amount of perturbation in your habits and methods over time, so I think trying a bunch of different exercises will be helpful even if I find them annoying. I'll see if I keep it up!

So yes. Let me know if you've read it and you have thoughts, or would like to read it and will have thoughts in future.