"The Right to Write" reviewed by Cornelia Lyon

An Invitation and an Initiation into the Writing Life.
Julia Cameron, MacMillan, London, 2000 (ISBN 0 3333 78203 8)

Although Julia Cameron is an experienced creative writing teacher, this is not a technical book. Her field is helping people access their creativity, lose their inhibitions and develop confidence in their ability to write and write well.

She focuses on helping experienced writers to work through creative blocks, and helping aspiring writers to explore, exploit, and value their creative capacity. She has been a working writer for three decades, in the fields of journalism, fiction and non-fiction books, plays, a musical, poetry and filmmaking.

Her stated aim in the introduction is to break down the negative mythology that surrounds the writing life in our culture, and provide readers with simple techniques to move them through blocks and sticking points in their writing. Ms Cameron's premise is that our confidence in ourselves as good writers is destroyed early by the valuing of the one (academic) style of writing over others, the overblown mystique that surrounds working writers, and the devaluing of our own efforts by the world unless our work is published.

The cumulative outcome is that many people who could be very good writers are deflected from writing by the feeling that they are not good enough or clever enough, or there's no point in doing it.

She believes that we all have the capacity, through writing, to engage with something or someone in our psyche (or beyond it). With the result that we access a wellspring of creativity and fluidity of expression which provides satisfaction, enjoyment and confidence, and often better writing than before. This feeling of being a channel for writing is not new; many great artists int he past have ascribed their work to God guiding their hand, and there are current articles online about contemporary writers experiencing being 'taken over' by their characters.

Ms Cameron offers 43 topics of 2-3 pages each. These are not sequential—you can dip into them at random, as a morning meditation, or because the titles attract you. Because of this structure there is necessarily some repetition, but this is only a problem if you begin at the beginning and work straight through, as I did. I would suggest that reading the first 40 or 50 pages straight through would be helpful in understanding her theories and recommended processes. Then the remaining sections could be sampled in any order. I found only two or three that were not particularly interesting or useful to me. The rest were at least interesting, and mostly very useful and (to a wannabe writer) inspiring.

As a general overview her techniques encourage you to 'just DO it!' But she prescribes that you get started in safe ways that encourage freedom and fluidity. Her key exercise requires three pages of stream of consciousness writing, every morning, no excuses. You are to forget being a good (ie publishable) writer and just start with one sentence then a paragraph then a page then three pages. These are not for publication, although you may find useful ideas in them later. So there is no threat, no risk, just the freedom to write freely and fluidly about whatever is on your mind at the moment. 'Morning Pages' is akin to an athlete's warming and stretching exercises.

She addresses :

• finding time to write;
• dealing with procrastination;
• letting go of perfectionism;
• feeding 'the writer within';
• the need to draft first and elaborate later;
• being 'in the mood' to write;
• taking control of your writing;
• valuing and using your own experiences;
• the dangers involved in asking for feedback from the wrong people;
• and many other topics, demonstrating her experience and expertise in the richness of her own writing and the poetry she includes to highlight points.

Some people may find the 'new age' language something of an obstacle. I suspect that Ms Cameron is very well grounded in the writings of Carl Jung, but has chosen the New Age lingua as more familiar, less intimidating and obscure than that of Jung.

All in all I think that this is an excellent early read for aspiring writers, and of quite a lot of use to working writers as well.

Cornelia Lyon
January 2008