Julia Cameron says we are creative but we so often say not. The Artist's Way, her first book, kicked this excuse in to touch with its guide to defeating inner demons and rewarding creative angels. In a nutshell, write a morning journal on anything for three pages to ambush your inner critic and go out alone weekly to any artistic event to refresh your imagination. It works…honest! An Art Exhibition got me thinking about writing in these ways.

* A picture with images falling out and in…so why not a story of characters and events that fall in and out of the main plot

* Victorian prints mixed with photographic images and unnaturalistic stencils combine to create eerie and disturbing images… so create a story by taking a random handful of images cut from magazines as a starting point

* Pictures of ordinary objects made macabre… have images in the story at odds with the readers expectation, make the corpse of a women erotic, the murder comedic

Don’t get it? Then read How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy) which attacks those inner demons with witty cartoons. Recognize any of these…

Read all the forwarded emails from your friends instead of writing your novel

Choose someone feels their dreams and goals are more important then yours

Understand no circumstances make any art just for fun

Play and creativity follows is what she wants you to accept. Writing or painting class are still needed to learn the tricks of the trade but your imagination is already waiting to burst out. ( )

A silly, fitfully amusing book about ways to avoid making art. Was received as a gift. ( )