Patricia Harrelson

I read the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron close to twenty years ago. While some of her ideas were a little too gooey for me, I did come away with two practices that I regularly use to stimulate my writing.

One is morning pages. While I don’t write in my journal every morning, I do write EVERY day . . . Here are some things I count as creative writing:

• freewriting with my students
• writing a blog entry
• writing an email message that describes
• responding to a blog with a comment the extends the conversation
• writing a review on GoodReads
• creating a greeting card (birthday, anniversary, congratulations)
• business correspondence that uses colorful examples to make my point
• writing love notes to my sweetie that go in her lunch box

The second thing I learned from Cameron is making artist dates, i.e. creating opportunities to nurture my creative consciousness. Since I’m fascinated by imagery, I often look toward the visual artists to feed this element of my creativity. Visual artists have taught me much about:

• focal point
• juxtaposition
• color
• perspective
• depth

Films are particularly good at serving up wonderful studies in visual imagery. I recently watched a Japanese film that was a marvelous eye feast in which the imagery fed the message: Love My Life.  (It got a lousy review on Rotten Tomatoes, but I thought the filming was amazing and happened to like the story very much.)

And here is an amazing visual collage on YouTube that made me want to take a videography class. I watched this clip 5 times ever marveling at the way these images work together and with the music.

These are two ways I work to stimulate my writing life. What do you do to keep your art alive?