The Right to Write

An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life

What if everything we have been taught about learning to write is wrong?

In The Right to Write, Julia Cameron's most revolutionary book, the author asserts that conventional writing wisdom would have you believe in a false doctrine that stifles creativity. With the techniques and anecdotes in The Right to Write, readers learn to make writing a natural, intensely personal part of life.

Cameron's instruction and examples include the details of the writing processes she uses to create her own bestselling books. She makes writing a playful and realistic as well as a reflective event.

Anyone jumping into the writing life for the first time and those already living it will discover the art of writing is never the same after reading The Right to Write.

Dimensions: 8.38" x 5.4"
Details: Paperback, 236 pages
Author: Julia Cameron

Testimonials

Amazon.com
Writing, for Julia Cameron, is neither solely vocation nor avocation: it is a way of life. It comes first thing in the morning, while the horses are waiting to be fed; it happens at the kitchen counter, while the onions are sautéing; it takes place on "dates" at café tables shared with likeminded friends; it unfurls in the mind as the '65 pickup "bucks over the rutted dirt roads like a stiff-legged bronco." The more than 40 brief personal essays that make up The Right to Write are an unyielding affirmation of the writing life and a denigration of all that gets in the way: busy schedules, procrastination, insecurity, lack of writing space, a day job--you get the point. Cameron's commonsense advice is liberating to anyone who has felt hampered by making a big deal out of writing (this "tends to make writing difficult. Keeping writing casual tends to keep it possible"), by not having the time to write ("Get aggressive. Steal time"), or the like. If you find a spirit that compares writing to revelation, prayer, and Zen pursuits, that might just attribute misguided communication to Mercury retrograde simpatico, then you will find much to embrace here. And you will never, never again dream of waiting for that commitment-free sabbatical in the south of France to get your writing project under way.

From Publishers Weekly
In a flowing sequence of personal essays and exercises (many of them reprises from her bestselling The Artist's Way), Cameron seeks to help readers enjoy writing as a natural, joyful process. "All of us have a sex drive. All of us have a drive to write." She offers advice on how to get over the stiffness or outright paralysis that creeps in when people make writing a "Big Deal." Wholeheartedly believing in writing as a process that connects us to the divine, whether we experience that finer source as internal or external, Cameron is refreshingly real. She invites readers to make use of the interruptions and torments as well as the sensual pleasures of their lives (for example, through the creation of a real or imaginary "Wall of Infamy," using memories of people who have hurt them) as a source of energy that can be focused to write their way "clear of rage, frustration, and negativity." Acknowledging that she is "a sort of creative nurse practitioner," Cameron, telling the stories behind some of her own stories and poems, shows how writing can lead us down into the most vibrant parts of ourselves, to the very source of health. Although she covers much of the same territory she explored in The Artist's Way, Cameron's prose and anecdotes sparkle with fresh, lived experience, demonstrating that when the subject is creativity, a writer really can't enter the same stream twice.

About Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way and The Vein of Goldis an award winning journalist, writer, theologian and poet, who has written for most major national publications including The New York Times, LA Times, Rolling Stone, Chicago Tribune, and The Village Voice. She was also a contributing editor to American Film Magazine for many years. She has written television, films, plays and short stories and, though primarily a working artist, she is internationally known for her work on creativity.

Writing since the age of 18, Cameron has had an accomplished, distinguished, and extensive journalism career, and her credits include writing on the arts for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. At age 23, Cameron was already writing features and book criticism for the Washington Post and later covered arts as a special correspondent for The Chicago Tribune for several years.

She wrote for Rolling Stone and New York magazine, during their most influential years, and was cited in Time for her Watergate coverage in Rolling Stone. Hand-picked by legendary editor Jim Bellows, she wrote an OpEd column for the Los Angeles Times Herald Examiner. Cameron has been a frequent columnist and contributor to Vogue, Mademoiselle, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Savvy, Cosmopolitan, and others, and has been a contributing editor for American Film magazine for more than a decade.

From the popular workshops on unlocking creativity and living from the creative center she has taught for two decades came her book THE ARTIST'S WAY (Tarcher/Putnam), which has become an international best-seller, published in a dozen languages with worldwide sales of over 1 million copies.

She has taught THE ARTIST'S WAY workshops to such places as the Smithsonian, The New York Times, Omega, Esalin, the Open Center, Interface, Wisdom House, and many others. As a result of her workshops and book, THE ARTIST'S WAY, creativity groups have formed across America, and throughout the world, from the jungles of Panama to the Outback of Australia.