Alice Walker, author of The color purple, prepares his writing with gardening, hiking, swimming, and long periods of apparent inactivity. He described his characters as needing countryside, and he moved to the countryside for them. It is, almost literally, the practice that Julia Cameron calls appointment with the artist: filling the well before emptying it.
A writer who listens to her characters
Alice Walker (Georgia, 1944) won the Pulitzer with The color purple, an epistolary novel about the life of a black woman in the rural South of the United States. She is also a poet, essayist and activist, and one of the voices that recovered the work of Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion.
What makes his testimony about the creative process unique is the relationship he describes with his characters. Walker has said that, while working on The color purple, their characters were not comfortable in New York. That they wanted a field. And that she moved away.
To a skeptical reader that will sound like mystification. To anyone who has worked on a long project, this will sound like a fairly accurate description of what happens: the material demands certain conditions and the author provides them, even if he cannot explain why.
Walker didn't sit and wait. He swam, walked through the forest, lay in the meadows, dreamed and cultivated his garden. Then he wrote.
The garden as an appointment with the artist
Julia Cameron calls appointment with the artist to a weekly solo excursion, without a productive objective, dedicated exclusively to receiving impressions. The instruction includes solitude: no companions, no turning it into a social activity.
A garden meets all the requirements and adds one of its own: the time scale. Nothing that is planted produces today. Working the land reeducates impatience in a way that no mental technique can, because learning is not intellectual but corporal.
The article about the Artist's Path for gardeners develops this idea, and the dates with the artist in nature proposes variants for those who do not have a meter of land.
The key point, in the Walker case, is that the garden is not a break from writing. It is where the writing is prepared. That reversal of priorities is what is difficult to imitate.
The invisible productivity
Our culture only knows how to measure what we see. Written words, hours in front of the computer, publications per month. Everything that precedes the page—the walk, the conversation, the boredom, the dream—counts as wasted time.
Cameron dedicates a good part of his method to defending this invisible phase. He creative well It is filled with images, smells, textures and encounters. Writing without having experienced anything new in months is like cooking with an empty pantry: you can, but the same dish always comes out.
The Walker case provides an important nuance: it is not enough to consume culture. Cameron's date with the artist can be a museum, yes, but also a hardware store or a nursery. What fills the well is the physical sensation, not the sophistication of the stimulus.
If you haven't produced anything you like for months, ask yourself when was the last time you touched earth, water or wood with your hands. The answer is usually revealing.
Write from the body and from the place
Walker moved to the country for his novel. It's an extreme version of something many writers do: change places to change voices. The place is not decorated. It determines the rhythm of the sentences, the available vocabulary, the scale of the conflicts that occur to one.
In practical terms, almost no one can move for a project. But almost everyone can change rooms, tables, cafeterias. The number of blockages that are resolved by changing where you sit is surprising and somewhat humiliating.
We have written about setting up your own space in the artist's studio in a small house and about the ritual of the table in how to set the table for morning pages.
It's also worth saying: Walker wrote about sexual violence, racism and extreme poverty from a garden. The serenity of the surroundings did not dilute the matter. Made it bearable to write.
A four-step method that you can copy
First, empty your head. Three handwritten pages when I woke up, without rereading. It is what prevents the noise of the day from taking up the space of real writing. If you don't know how to start, here is the complete guide.
Second, move your body without headphones. Walk, swim, dig. Half an hour. No podcast. The goal is for the mind to wander, and the mind does not wander if someone is talking to it.
Third, write in the state that remains. Don't wait to be inspired. After emptying and moving, you will be in a good enough state. Inspiration, in most jobs, comes half an hour after starting.
Fourth, stop before you exhaust yourself. Walker describes long gestation periods between books. Closing the day with unwritten material is the best way to look forward to coming back tomorrow.
The four times fit in two hours. You don't need a garden or a Pulitzer.
What this case doesn't say
It doesn't say that nature cures the blockage. There are people who go to the countryside to write and discover that the problem was in the suitcase. Silence amplifies what one carries inside, including fear.
It does not say that writing is a mystical act. Walker worked for years, revising, collecting advances, negotiating with publishers. The contemplative part coexists with a very earthly job, as we remember in how to live from art without getting lost.
And it doesn't say that you have to wait for the characters to speak. That's a metaphor about attention, not an operational instruction. He who waits to hear voices does not write; He who writes three bad pages a daand inds up hearing something.
Julia Cameron put it with her usual directness: you don't have to feel creative to create. You have to create, and then you feel creative.
The garden of our mothers
There is an essay by Walker that is worth keeping in mind when talking about gardens. In it she asks where the creativity of the black women of the South who could not write or paint was, and answers that it was in their gardens, in their quilts, in the way of fixing a house with nothing. Art existed; What was missing was the permission to call it that.
This displacement is exactly what Julia Cameron proposes when she states that we are all creative and that most of us have learned not to call it by its name. The accountant who cooks obsessively, the clerk who restores furniture, the nurse who photographs everything she sees: there is work in progress and there is no word for it.
The method begins precisely there, with what Cameron calls the recovery of a sense of security. Before aspiring to write a novel, you have to recognize what you are already doing. We treat it in how to recover lost creativity and in the shadow artist.
Alice Walker's garden, in this reading, is not a hobby of a dedicated writer. It is the continuation of a tradition of women who created in the only place where they were allowed to do so, and a warning about how easy it is to not see creativity when it is not signed.
To continue
Alice Walker's case fits with a family of artists who ritualize preparation: Maya Angelou I rented an empty hotel room, Tony Morrison I watched the sunrise with a coffee before writing, Patti Smith He writes in cafes at fixed times.
None of those rituals have magical power. What they have in common is that they mark a boundary between ordinary life and work, and that they are concrete enough not to allow negotiation.
Your ritual can be watering some pots. The important thing is that it is always the same, that it happens before writing and that you do not skip it on the day when you least feel like it. That day, precisely, is the one that counts.