Alex Casey delves into the enduring success of The Artist’s Way, a self-help book beloved by everyone from retirees to famous rappers.
On the video call, my mum is gesticulating so wildly while recounting all her recent creative endeavours that she knocks her cup of tea over a work-in-progress jigsaw puzzle. She’s been painting gnomes, baking macarons, writing children’s books and collaging. She’s been to see “weird, weird, weird” contemporary art installations, visited the dump “just for a poke around” and has even been to see a “terrible” live hypnotist show. She’s nearly at the end of The Artist’s Way, and is positively bubbling over with excitement and ideas.
Mum is far from the only person fizzing at the bung over The Artist’s Way right now. Written in 1992 by screenwriter Julia Cameron, the book details a “spiritual path to higher creativity” over 12 weeks. Participants are given tasks to “discover and recover” their creative selves, always anchored by the two main tools of the course – the morning pages and the artist’s date. The former is a commitment to write three longhand free association pages every morning, the latter is to take yourself, alone, on a creative date once a week (hence the hypnotist).
Three decades since publication, The Artist’s Way has sold over five million copies around the world, and continues to be a steady backlist title here in Aotearoa. Scorpio Books in Ōtautahi reports “astoundingly regular” sales across generations and demographics, with Unity Books in Pōneke noting a “marked increase” more recently. Library statistics also support its unwavering popularity: in Tāmaki Makaurau 731 people have borrowed The Artist’s Way since 2021, and down south in Ōtautahi the book has been loaned out 536 times since 2017. And that’s before we even get to the spinoff books.
Personally, I have returned to The Artist’s Way whenever I have felt myself Animorphing into that monstrous 3D modelled remote worker, swollen eyes locked on the laptop all day and the phone all night, dreams plagued by anxiety and analytics. A wonderful writer friend sent me their copy in 2022, and since then I’ve completed a Saturday creative writing class, read a poem (wtf) to a room of strangers, collaged greeting cards, learned to sew, and all manner of other imaginative undertakings that would have elicited a manic pixie dream hurl just a few short years ago.
Anecdata suggests that The Artist’s Way is primarily spread by this sort of contagion. All it takes is one person in your contacts to start frothing at the mouth about being “unblocked” and soon you are rollerblading around your garage trying to connect with your inner child (also did this). And if a recommendation doesn’t come from someone you know, it might come from a celebrity. In 2021, model Bella Hadid was spotted carrying the book through New York City, and recently TikTok has gone crazy for rapper Doechii’s YouTube vlogs about working through the course.
It was through this social media hype that Jason Parker, an Auckland-based pop musician, felt the pull to return to The Artist’s Way after attempting it a few years prior. “On TikTok, every second video was someone filming their progress with The Artist’s Way,” he laughs. “And then a friend started doing it and posting some really amazing findings for himself. I literally ordered the book later that day.” He’s now halfway through the course, and has found “a real community” in the Artist’s Way Reddit and following “just regular people” working through it on TikTok.
Actor and theatre-maker Ella Hope-Higginson has also found a sense of connection while working through the course with a large group chat of local multi-disciplinary artists. She first attempted it after the lockdowns, but found the high volume of tasks (which can include writing letters to your past and future selves and collaging your ideal life) and regular morning pages an initial struggle. “Now it feels like some of the stuff is more ingrained the second time around, like the morning pages don’t feel like a hell hole,” she says. “Now I actually really love writing them.”
Hope-Higginson is not alone in her love for the daily journaling practice. A social media callout saw all manner of poets, musicians, comedians, actors and writers mention the morning pages as the most impactful part of The Artist’s Way process, with many returning to it as a crucial tool whenever they feel creatively blocked. “It’s about being honest with yourself and your thought patterns and beliefs,” Hope-Higginson says. “It’s not therapy, but I think that the pages can do some really good work as a placeholder for just noticing how you are going.”
Within the repetitive pages and weekly tasks, which can be as simple as pressing flowers or as confronting as writing about your nemesis, some people have made earth-shattering realisations. Ōtautahi performer Naomi van den Broek says The Artist’s Way was a huge factor in motivating her to end a toxic and abusive relationship when she first read the book in 2007. “It was a big massive life explosion,” she says. “There was a lot of denial from me to stay in that relationship, but the chapter on ‘crazymakers’ in combination with the morning pages made me go ‘oh, fuck – I need to leave my marriage’.”
While there are plenty more positive stories of people chalking up The Artist’s Way to helping them through massive life and career changes, the book is not entirely free from criticism. “The hardest part for me was that the word ‘God’ is used a lot throughout,” says Parker. “I’m not a religious person and I’m queer, so I do have my issues with organised religion.” Sometimes, the emphasis on the spiritual can tip even the most open-minded folk into cynicism. “When she’s like ‘go pick up five rocks and carry them around in your pocket’, I was like, ‘absolutely not’.”
The chapter about money also grates in this economy, inviting people to log every cent because “it will teach you what you value”. Particularly galling when a block of butter costs $10, and even more so when you consider the enormous riches amassed through Cameron’s own companion book empire, which includes The Artist’s Way for Retirement, The Complete Artist’s Way, Living the Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Creativity, Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart, Write for Life: A Toolkit for Writers, or Seeking Wisdom: A Spiritual Path to Creative Connection.
Where the current moment helps The Artist’s Way is that the book makes absolutely no mention of social media or the internet, which subtly filters it out of your own thinking. One challenge calls for a week of ‘reading deprivation’ of all media entirely, which Parker says made a huge impact on his relationship with his phone. “I would get home from work, go on a massive walk, colour in and go to sleep,” he laughs. “I’ve now taken a huge break from posting on social media, turned off my notifications, and use Do Not Disturb mode way more often.”
The screen-free nature of the tasks also hugely appealed to Hope-Higginson. “When I’m doing my exercises, I’ll have a little candle lit at the table and I’m not doing anything on my laptop or my phone. It’s all in notebooks, all pen and paper, and it’s beautiful.” Van den Broek agrees. “Instead of doom scrolling, this is so much nicer and kinder to yourself,” she says. “It’s an extremely analog approach to creativity, which I think really resonates in an age where nothing feels analog anymore, and more people are wanting to opt out of that capitalist attention cycle.”
As Parker puts it, doing The Artist’s Way in 2025 mostly serves as “a reminder that life isn’t supposed to feel like a fucking slog.” While it will test some people’s capacity for woo-woo, it also centres creativity into daily life in a way that doesn’t tie it to output, money, or accolades. For my dear old Mum, who longed to paint all her life but was forced to study science and maths, it’s allowed her to fulfill a lifelong dream to make art every day. Recently at the “weird, weird, weird” exhibition, she was asked what she did for work, and said something she’s never said out loud before.
“I’m an artist.”
