Reading Deprivation Week

Sh*t gets real as I continue working through The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way is going fine, thanks for asking. Mostly the exercises are pretty harmless, or things you’d expect to be asked to do or think about. List five hobbies that sound fun. Ten items I would like to own but don’t are… You know, stuff to get to know yourself better and extract your motivations from inside your subconscious.

But then I hit week four, and Julia’s demands suddenly got unreasonable.

You can’t be serious!

Deep sigh.

OK, let’s see. Obviously, I can’t not read at all, but I can be A LOT more selective in what reaches my eyeballs.

The experience was surprising and the result unexpected, so I’ll share it with you.

Here’s my reading deprivation journal:

Day 0. Set ground rules:

Reading that is OK:

• Reading for work

• Reading for Uncharted Territories (UT) edits¹

• Reading personal messages (including comments on my stuff)

• Reading The Artist’s Way (only assignments, not text - Julia said that was OK)

• Reading street signs, maps, incidental reading…

Reading that is off limits:

• Books

• Newsletters

• Comments on other people’s stuff (including UT)

• Scrolling any social media at all

I decided to start at bedtime so I turned off the light after writing but not reading. Reading before bed is a habit that stretches back since I learned to read. Even when I roll home drunk at 3am, I always always always read a page or two of a novel.

Day 1. Tempted to open Facebook, Google News, or Substack Notes. Resisted. Read emails and checked grant proposals (I work in research admin).

Day 2. Watched a Substack Live for the second time ever. Felt satiated. Edited an article. Went to bed after writing but not reading.

Day 3. Found myself opening random grant applications and reading proposals at work (my job is to process them, not read them), and then catching myself and closing the files. Newsletters piled up in my inbox unread. Started to wonder if I really need so many.

Please don’t be offended if I didn’t read your newsletter last week. I’m trying to get back to them while the new ones keep coming.

Day 4. Edited in the morning. Went to a concert so very little temptation. Afternoon/evening of music and picnic with family members.

Day 5. UT article came out and generated more comments than likes. Must be a record. Didn’t read a single one. Mum sent her first Substack article, declaring her intention to break the record for the oldest person to sail non-stop around the world single-handed without support. Didn’t read it (but did share). Went to a cafe for lunch and picked up the paper and started reading. Whoops! Wrote part of a Kyron chapter and workshopped it with ChatGPT. Read ChatGPT’s responses and some were quite long and in-depth. Felt a bit naughty. Gained good insight into characters’ back stories, personalities, and desires.

Day 6. Back at work. Read emails and checked grants and started writing a process. Trapeze class after work.

Day 7. Finished writing the process document, checked multiple grants, edited an article, transferred J2K chapter to Substack and sent. Felt more productive than ever. Went to bed after writing but not reading.

I woke up on day 8 and opened Notes and started to scroll. Then closed it quite quickly because it just wasn’t that interesting.

So I survived. I’m now reading more deliberately and I will try to stick to that. It seemed to make me more productive by the end of the week, but I’m hesitant to mix causation with correlation.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, Homo Deus, and Nexus, advocates for consuming less content and thinking more about the things we already know. He spends a couple of weeks each year on a meditation retreat where he presumably reads nothing at all. And no one would ever accuse him of not being informed, educated, and well-read.

Of course, the Substack ecosystem is tricky. I’m aiming to find subscribers who vibe with this strange, nonsensical thing I’m doing, and part of that is subscribing to others and supporting their efforts like I want to be supported. There’s a huge amount of great content out there, but I know I can support people by reading and commenting on their stuff without it necessarily arriving in my inbox.

When The Artist’s Way was written in 1994, there was no social media, very few blogs or newsletters, very little email even. Phones were dumb, and reading was mostly done on paper made from trees. But still, Julia could have been writing about today’s overloaded world when she said “We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up… Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried.” The idea is to clear some space for emptiness and “our reward will be a new outflow. Our own art, our own thoughts and feelings, will begin to nudge aside the sludge of blockage, to loosen it and move it upward and outward until once again our well is running freely.”

That certainly seemed to be my experience, even if the output that made it into last week’s Substack was underwhelming to readers. I gained a lot from writing that chapter. Became closer to Jia Wei and his sister than I ever was in the previous iterations of this story. Learned about their childhood and their rivalries and their past traumas. Lin’s husband even gained his own set of motivations, which he never had before.

This moment of character discovery indeed unblocked me, even if only briefly. And, as any longtime readers know, writing this novel is the reason for everything - why I started a Substack, and why I’m doing the Artist’s Way. For that alone, reading deprivation week was worth it.

It would be good to be able to do a reading deprivation week when I’m on leave from work, to really make space for my own thoughts, but that will have to wait.

What about you? Have you ever tried reading deprivation as a tool to fight artist’s block? If so, how did it go? If not, is it something you’d ever try?

1. Uncharted Territories is the Substack newsletter I edit in my spare time. It’s good and covers a huge variety of topics; you should read it if you live on Earth.