Encouraging Words of Julia Cameron

Here are some encouraging quotes from Julia Cameron's The Right to Write (1998, New York: Putnam). I like Cameron's direct style. While she doesn't use the word, she's thought a lot about the psychology of writing -- and how wonky thinking can get us writers stuck in psychological traps!

Here are some of the lines my pen was drawn to highlight:

On how we think of ourselves as writers ~

• "...the act of writing makes you a writer..." (p.7)
• "If only we could give ourselves permission to write 'badly', so many of us would write very well indeed." (p.23)
• "...in order to be a good writer, I have to be willing to be a bad writer." (p.23)
• "We can either demand that we write well or we can settle more comfortably into writing down what seems to want to come through us -- good, bad, or indifferent." (p.11)

On our attitude to time ~

• "One of the biggest myths around writing is that in order to do it we must have great swathes of uninterrupted time." (p.13)
• "The obsession with time is really an obsession with perfection. We want enough time to write perfectly." (p.16)
• "The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got." (p.16)

On silencing our internal critic ~

• "My job was to do the writing, not judge the writing." (p.19)

On being open to the mystery of creativity ~

• "I believe that what we want to write wants to be written." (p.18)
• "Writing -- and this is the big secret -- wants to be written." (p.20)