INTRODUCTION
On January 25, 1978, I got sober. “Mark this day on your calendar,” I was advised. “It’s the most important day of your life.” I greeted this advice with skepticism. How could a sobriety date be more important than a birthday or a wedding anniversary? It just did not seem possible. Now, thirty-one years later, I recognize the wisdom in singling out that date. I have gone on from there, one day at a time, to maintain my sobriety through both joy and tumult.
“God will never give you more than you can handle,” I was told, with the added footnote, “one day at a time.” Again, this advice proved wise. On days when my emotional plate felt overladen, I learned to remind myself, “Just one day at a time.” Fortunately for me, I got sober in Southern California—sometimes referred to as the “Harvard of Recovery.”
“If it’s a choice between sobriety and creativity, I don’t know that I’ll choose sobriety,” I complained to my sober mentors in my early months of abstinence.
“There is no choice between sobriety and creativity,” they told me. “Without sobriety, there will be no creativity.”
And so, I learned that the principle of “one day at a time” applied to my creative life. Pre-sobriety, I had written in binges. Post-sobriety, I learned to write daily, without drama. I was a writer, and writers wrote. Simple as that. “God takes care of the quality; you take care of the quantity,” I was advised. “Stop trying to make something up, and try, instead, to get something down.” Direction was important here. If I was “making something up,” I was straining to reach for something that might be beyond my grasp. If I was “getting something down,” I was taking dictation from a higher source.
God is the Great Creator, I came to believe, as I strove to forge an artist-to-artist relationship. I came to believe that creativity is God’s will for us, and that we can practice creativity like any other spiritual practice—a day at a time.
In 1980, composer Billy May gave me a tiny but powerful prayer book: Creative Ideas by Ernest Holmes. Holmes believed that God’s will for us is expansive creativity. Working with his prayers, I came to believe the same thing. Rather than regard myself as the self-conscious author of my work, I began to think of myself more as a conduit, a channel through which the Great Creator’s creativity could enter the world.
In 1992, I published The Artist’s Way—a book which hammered out spiritual principles as a path to higher creativity. To my delight, The Artist’s Way caught fire. More than three million people purchased the book and employed its principles to expand their creativity. The Artist’s Way worked as a daily spiritual practice. Its central tool, three pages of longhand morning writing called “Morning Pages,” became known as an effective catalyst for personal growth. Many people worked The Artist’s Way repeatedly, circling back through its pages at ever-increasing depth. As for myself, I have written Morning Pages more than two decades now. They are the bedrock of my spiritual practice; a daily discipline that yields prodigious results.
“Your book changed my life,” I am frequently told. I have come to believe that the daily practice of creativity yields an expanded and deepened sense of spirituality in the lives of Artist’s Way practitioners. And so it is with an eye to increasing both creativity and spirituality that I gathered together the teachings found in this book.
I have written more than thirty books using the tools and the concepts that these pages encompass. It is my belief that heightened productivity will come to all who work with them.