Working the Artists Way

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A while back, Fin grabbed a copy of “The Artists Way” - a self-help book for “blocked creatives”. We’ve both looked at it a couple times, but over the last few months, I decided to actually make an honest go of working the program. The course itself is essentially a reframed “12-step” program for people “blocked” in their creative process. Despite the billing as creativity rehab, the course really shades heavily into the mental health world. After finishing, one of the last “tasks” is to share the book / experience. So, in keeping with that, I’m dropping my review here. TL;DR - I enjoyed it but with some caveats.

The Course

The course book is organized as 12-week course with daily and weekly activities. Constant through the entire course is daily journaling, a weekly “Artist Date”, and a weekly check-in. Varying each week is a set of homework - various tasks to encourage creative introspection. The course text follows the same 12-week process with a chapter per week for reading. The format of the book lends toward wanting to read the chapters through the course, but I’d argue reading the entire book first is a good idea as some of the homework relies on previous chapters and other chapters might require some planning for their homework.

The book might be a bit niche, but it seems fairly popular in some circles. It was originally published back in 1992. Google claims it’s a “Popular Program” - but I don’t know that it’s something one would generally run across unless you happened upon a book club or creative clique where it was known. There’s a dedicated reddit and other random social media groups. I didn’t participate in any - but did run across them through web searches when I hit a couple “WTF?” moments while reading. I generally found the online communities a bit off-putting - I’ll leave it as “not my scene”. With so many using the book it’s easy to obtain new on Amazon, or you can grab a copy for a couple bucks on ebay from the many people that gave it a brief try before donating / selling the thing.

The Positives

I’d argue the program actually works pretty darn well for stirring up the creative juices. The whole thing operates as basically a therapy tool with multiple of the recommendations / themes actually having an above average amount of research backed efficacy. For me, a lot of things operated as “permission to relax”. Several of the activities I had fun doing. A few I skipped. Many fell into the general camp of self-help book club fodder. If nothing else, it’s a good tool to get off the social media heroin.

The Mixed

This book is rather heavy in the Judeo-Christian viewpoint of God. The author never invokes Christian faith directly, but there is a thread of God’s involvement in your life / working God’s plan for you through the course. Her treatment of God through the text is rather in the “Higher Power” sense that often lands in recovery groups, including her use of the idea of God as “Good Orderly Direction”.

The course also has a slightly ‘uneven’ feel to it - the work / balance week to week feels really random. I suppose this might be intentional, but the lack of pacing made it difficult to plan / fit in the ideas of the class each week. I wished a few times that I’d planned my start date to a more general calendar of the following weeks.

The Negatives

The general vibe of this book is out-of-touch California trust-fund Hippy. There’s an inordinate amount of time spent on avoiding shitty people and updating your 5-minutes-out-of-season wardrobe. Cameron at one point gives example of ‘struggle’ as a daily cappuccino coming from your apartment’s machine. Or only buying one horse a decade. Many of her examples of ’things to do’ amount to impulse spending / shopping sprees.

I wish the tasks/reading was a bit more organized. Some of the homework is crazy general, some is specific, and sometimes it’s really unclear when a task might be reused or referenced later. A few asks are referenced multiple times throughout, so following the general online advice of “try to do most tasks” can result in gaps as you move through.

Final Words