 hello I'm in London but none of this video is set here. I want to talk to you about a book that has changed my life. So I've been putting off making this video for about three or four months and it's kind of what the book is about. I'll put it on the side of the screen here. It's called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. So I've been putting it off because I thought this video might involve me talking a lot and I could talk about this book all day long. So I thought I'd make this video maybe a bit more lively. It is, this is the actual book it's not a graphic. It is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Oh my goodness I know this is going to be a very long video so let's just embrace that. I think this is at the top of my list because this has had the biggest impact on me getting stuff out of my head and out into the world. It's a very gentle book it's 12 chapters and it's a very easy read and each chapter I'm just trying to find one. Each chapter is a week and that's significant so it's effectively a 12-week course. How can I put this? I'm from the UK so maybe one way to describe it is Californian where it's about just accepting that you have thoughts and feelings and things that you might be completely unaware of that are blocking you from being creative. So the idea of the book is you do these exercises they're very easy I found them good fun but there are these writing exercises and you just complete one chapter every week that's all you've got to do. I like this so much while I was reading it that I found myself skipping ahead which got a bit tricky because I've supposed to be doing the exercises on one week but I'm sort of reading ahead just because I enjoyed the reading enjoyed the prose. There are two big ideas in this book which are introduced in week one or chapter one and these two big ideas are morning pages and the artist's date. The morning pages are something else and I'm going to show you what they are by actually showing you my morning pages which you're not supposed to do so the idea of morning pages is this when you wake up in the morning before you do anything before you check your email or scroll through Facebook the first thing you should do in the morning is to sit down with a pad and fill three pages it takes about half an hour I think she's writing in the US legal pad size because I started mine in A5 in this really nice A5 book and I think that's a bit bit small so I took it's about five pages or half an hour whichever comes first and the idea of morning pages is that you basically free writes what's in your head literally word for word what's coming up in your brain so that could be I don't know what to write I don't want to do this I don't like my pen I'm too hot thingy looks at me funny yesterday what's that about I haven't paid the gas bill I haven't changed gas suppliers all of that junk just get it out of your head the only objective of the morning pages is to keep the pen moving I've got pencil keep the pen moving for half an hour and I found some techniques over time that when I started daydreaming or going off on one in my head if you just write the word thinking in brackets and they try and get the pen moving again that helped for me but all you've got to do is fill three pages obviously she explains it way more better than I am but I wanted to show you my morning pages because the other thing with morning pages is you are not supposed to show them to anyone they are not for anyone else the sole objective is to just get you to keep the pen moving and dump out what's in your head continuously for 30 minutes what I found was that stuff started coming out that I just wasn't expecting things that you're supposed to do today emerge and you might launch into writing out an email bits of you to do list but the other fantastic thing for me was the ideas that have been bubbling up in your head have a place to go you can just get them out of your head they're not supposed to be good some people call it journaling and I really don't think that's a good idea to call it journaling because that gives the impression that you're writing a diary and it might be you write about stuff that happened to you yesterday or things that you might do tomorrow but it's not journaling it's it's got to be junk you've got to write rubbish it's whatever comes up in your head don't make it good don't give a structure just sometimes broken half sentences come out that's okay so long as you keep the pen moving now I'm so worried about holding this up I've vetted this I'll look at the dates the 27th of awesome cover up it's the 27th of August so I've been holding on to this to share with you for oh my goodness six weeks now but as you can see it's really messy so I started off with a really nice 1.0 millimeter gel impact signo pen and I had a really nice paper chase a5 eco spiral bound notebook and that was great because the ink soaked up into the page really nice it just felt really nice to treat yourself to some nice stationery but over time I found that the more workman like I was about it because I'm just literally draining pens onto a page it's not writing it's free writing so it's it's junk it's got to come out as quickly as possible just keep that pen moving and what I found some ideas kept popping up sometimes I would get ideas for executing those ideas these pages tap into things that you don't realize that you're thinking about but these things are in your brain and there is such a release into just getting out on the page and then getting rid of it I read through it and I throw it away I started writing in volume I've been doing this for about five years before I read the book I'd heard about the morning pages because I hadn't read the book I thought well I'll type them because it will start me typing every morning so try to type a side of a4 every morning it turns out the problem with that is that subconsciously I think I'm holding stuff back because you're typing maybe there's a formality to it maybe because you know it's being electronically stored and hoarded the pages were different as soon as I started handwriting them all the stuff started coming out that I wasn't expecting and you don't actually have to sit down and and write good stuff all it is it's just dumping out what's in your brain if I said that enough times it's dumping out what's in your brain so then I had a new problem and my new problem was I had all this stuff that I didn't really want to keep because it can be quite whiny and petulant or maybe it's just my pages but my pages were quite whiny and petulant the book is very clear to say that's okay that's what they're for just dump out what's in your head so then I had this new problem which is that stuff in here which I really liked which made me happy like sentences or ideas or fully formed articles or emails that just vomited out I didn't have anywhere to put them and I didn't want to hoard all my writing I just wanted to keep the bits that made me happy so what I started to do is to box out I don't know if you can see this box it out the bit that you like that's actually a quote it's a quote from the Kransky sisters set it free if it comes back it will only bore if you want something set it free if it comes back it bores so just set it free but ironically that is what this this part of the explanation is about so I've got my bike I'm now writing biro because you can always find a biro from a express supermarket if you're out and about and you don't have a pen so box out the bit that I want and then I mark from right to left the bits that I've read so a new task emerged I was actually reading what I was writing in volume so now I'm writing in volume now I'm reading my own stuff in volume and then I get the bit that I want and I put that somewhere now before I started morning pages I had about seven documents where I would keep material so it's good in terms of volume but I honestly didn't know where to start when I would start writing each day is it you know which of the seven documents do I do a create a new one or do I maintain these other seven that I wasn't reading either I was just putting stuff into these documents and they weren't really going anywhere so it felt really good to solve this problem of volume by creating one document so now I have one word documents called 2019 you might be watching this in years to come so you could call it 2020 only recently I've now moved that document into the cloud so I can update it from anywhere so I've got that on Google Docs just one document and I just add to the bottom so this document is full of bits that make me happy and ideas and things that I want to keep that they're back here so it's 2019 and it's one single document of all my stuff sit down in that arm chair with a cup of coffee and just go through ideas that I've already written and I make them better or a share them but they've got one place to go it feels fantastic to not be hoarding whiny petulants that needs editing so basically edit it as you go so once I've typed up the bit that I want to keep in my 2019 documents and then put a line through it that way tear it out and I throw it away I've typed up the bits I want to keep the rest thank you for your service throw it away it is such a great little system for me every morning before I do anything I sit down with my notebook these are today's I don't want to show them to you I turn to the next clean page right the day at the top maybe the time I set the timer on my phone for 30 minutes and I just start writing whatever is in my head for 30 minutes sometimes I keep going sometimes it's really hard and I stop and it's a bit juddery so then the half hour is spent just trying to get the pen moving again I've been doing this handwritten for three years I don't really want to count the 60s before that typing and it has just helped me enormously it this just like this tsunami of material just comes out and I know that the other benefit of it is that I can not worry about it if I get an idea or something pops into my brain I don't want to forget I just bang it into the notebook on the next line I know it's going to be backed up and also I know that once every six weeks I'll have a nice time sat down with a coffee going through things that I've thought of it's just such a great system the artist way doesn't propose doing it that way all she's trying to get you to do is to write for half an hour of your morning before you do anything else but I found that that then opened up this portal of stuff that gave me the new problem of having somewhere to store it and a system to go through those ideas and do something with them but even the idea for that came from the morning pages I wish I could get sponsorship from paper chase I've done 46 of these books which I think is about 1.5 million words and if I had to sit down and write 1.5 million words over three years I think I'd feel slightly overwhelmed but morning pages we just keep the pen moving for half an hour for me it's it's a treat it's my bit of the day if you can find half an hour to do pages things will start happening so I'll just leave that with you because it might be something you want to try the second idea that Julia Cameron proposed is in the artist way is the idea of an artist's date I think I found that to be the biggest hardest thing in the book she very gently floats the idea that once a week you take yourself somewhere you go do something nice something that's pointless something that makes you happy or any stipulation is that you do it by yourself and you just mark out that time for you and it needn't be a whole day it could be 10-minute trip somewhere I didn't do it for first few weeks and then I did start doing it and it's fantastic it's a really nice thing to do for yourself so it does kickstart a process where you start exploring things things that you probably assume that you're too busy to do or too important or that the thing that you're doing is too silly this book will try to get you to do that again she explains it way more better than I can those are the only two things morning pages an artist's date that you will do every week if you go along with the 12 weeks and the 12 chapters the rest of it she sets little writing exercises they are really easy to do if you are writing out what's in your head every day it's then easy to slip into trying out some of the other things that she suggests and you don't have to do all of them I did and they're still benefiting me now I can't recommend it highly enough but it is one of those things that you just gonna have to see if it's for you but I think even having to go at the first week isn't going to take your life backwards or make you unhappy so that's it if you have any questions please put them in the comments if anyone reaches this point in the video why not give me a thumbs up just let me know someone reached this point it would also help me hugely if you subscribe by clicking on my face or subscribe button or the link in the description thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video can you please help my daddy get 1000 subscribers just click in the space thanks bye how was that