The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Author:Julia Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2017-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Think of this tool as a private resume. It will help point you in directions that have genuine meaning in your own value system. This tool is a potent defense against credibility attacks, as it reminds us firmly that our credibility is a spiritual, not material, issue.

PLACE

I BEGAN MY WRITING LIFE in the upstairs corner bedroom of my parents’ house. It was a small room. The dresser, desk, and bed were painted white. The curtains, gingham, were lilac and white checked. (I write in a lilac room with white curtains today.) In that gingham room I wrote my early poems and short stories dedicated to the intention of winning Peter Mundy’s heart.

My writing life moved after that down to the basement, my high school hangout. There was an upright piano, a poker table, a battered couch and chairs. In the basement half-light, I wrote high school journalism, poems, and more short stories. I wanted the attention of John Kane, and I got it.

When I went to college, my writing life began to occupy a cranny high up in Georgetown Library under the nose of a saturnine gargoyle, my critic incarnate. Poems, papers, and short stories unfurled beneath his baleful gaze.

When my parents became ill, I went back to Libertyville, Illinois, to care for them, and my writing life moved into a bilevel phase: the basement, again, where I wrote early Rolling Stone pieces, and my brother Jaimie’s bedroom, where I pursued a diet of apples, cheddar cheese, and J&B scotch while I wrote Morning, a (very) youthful novel. I used an old Olympia typewriter. Its body was the same trench-coat tan as my current computer.

When my parents recovered, my writing life and I moved back to Washington, D.C. Now I wrote in black and white speckled notebooks, in cafés, and parks, on a small schoolroom desk in front of a barred apartment window, on trains and in waiting rooms. My writing life, like my life itself, was becoming portable. I was hired as a mail sorter for The Washington Post and began writing there on long sheets of carboned paper rolled through heavy electric typewriters. My journalism career began.

That career took me to hotel rooms around the country, where I wrote on yellow legal pads or rented typewriters and rigged them up to write on card tables near the window of whatever was passing as the view. Flying to and from assignments, I discovered the joy of writing on airplanes, getting down page after page as we shot through a tunnel of time.

For a while I carried a black leather blank-sheet book and I sketched the locations in which I wrote. I seemed to be using the sketches like Polaroids: I was here doing this. I did not know then what I know now, that for me a sense of place is central to good writing.

I am thinking back to high school. We have been assigned to read The Scarlet Letter. I find the book boring despite its adultery. I

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