Writers Resources – Allan Johnson, PhD

Unlock Your Creativity with The Artist’s Way: Morning Pages and More

Posted on June 19, 2024June 8, 2024 by Allan Johnson in creativity

Julia Cameron is a prolific author, artist, and teacher best known for her transformative work in the realm of creativity who has helped millions of people worldwide unlock their creative potential through her innovative techniques and practices. One of her most influential and widely used techniques, first introduced in The Artist’s Way, is called Morning Pages, a simple but very powerful invitation to write three stream of consciousness pages every morning to get down a jumble of thoughts, plans, worries, and hopes down on paper first thing in the morning. I’ve seen how Morning Pages can reduce anxiety and creates a sense of mental clarity that can positively impact your day. The beauty of Morning Pages lies in its simplicity and accessibility; all it takes to start is a notebook and pen.

While Morning Pages are definitely the most well-known of Cameron’s techniques, The Artist’s Way is rich with other innovative tools and insights designed to help us reclaim our creativity and personal power. I want to dive into some of these lesser known but equally powerful practices from her book, including the Artist Date, Affirmations, Time Travel, Synchronicity, and Creative U-Turns. By integrating these practices into our daily lives, we can expand our creative horizons and find deeper fulfilment in our life and work.

Nurturing Your Creative Self

For Cameron, the second most important tool after Morning Pages is the Artist Date, a weekly solo expedition to explore something that really interests you. It is a commitment to nurture your inner artist by setting aside time each week to do something you enjoy.

The importance of play, exploration and creativity cannot be overstated. Our daily routines often leave little room for spontaneity and fun, both of which are crucial for fostering creativity. As Cameron points out, Artist Dates encourage us to step out of our usual habits and see the world through new eyes, with a sense of wonder and curiosity. Some of the Artist Dates I enjoy are visiting a museum, taking a walk in one of the parks around London, going to a concert on my lunch break, or visiting an art shop to try something new.

Fitting Artist Dates into a busy schedule can definitely be a challenge, but it’s important that you prioritise this time for yourself, even if it’s just an hour a week: start by setting aside an hour each week for your artist states. Think of it as a non-negotiable appointment with your creative self.

Overcoming Creative Blocks

We regularly face blocks that hinder our progress on whatever we are working on. In The Artist’s Way, Cameron offers several tools to help us overcome these blocks and keep our creative energy flowing. One of the most important tools for overcoming creative blocks is the use of affirmations, positive statements that can counteract negative self-talk and limiting mindsets. For example, an affirmation could be: ;’I’m a talented and capable creator’ or ‘my creativity flows effortlessly.’ By repeating affirmations, we can rewire our neural pathways and cultivate a more positive and supportive inner dialogue.

Another important tool in The Artist’s Way called Time Travel, where we use journaling to work through and heal past creative wounds. Many of us carry emotional baggage from past experiences where our creativity was criticised or rejected. By acknowledging these wounds and writing through them, we can begin to free ourselves from their negative effects.

Cameron also introduces the concept of Creative U-turns, moments when we sabotage our own progress, often out of fear of success or failure. It’s important to recognise these patterns and consciously choose to overcome them. For example, if you find yourself putting off a project, you’re excited about, recognise this behaviour as creative U and take action to overcome it by breaking the project down into smaller tasks or setting a fixed deadline.

The Importance of Synchronicity

A key component of The Artist’s Way is synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences, and Cameron emphasises synchronicity as a guiding force in the creative process. When we open ourselves up to creativity, we often notice patterns and coincidences that seem to lead us in the right direction. These moments of synchronicity can be seen as signs that we’re on the right path. Recognising and trusting synchronicities means being open and receptive to the messages the universe sends us. This can be as simple as noticing recurring themes in conversations, books, or experiences that seem to resonate with your creative project. It can also mean paying attention to your gut instincts and intuitive impulses that guide your decisions, those little signals that keep us on the right path.

Cameron shares numerous personal anecdotes about how synchronicity has played a role in her creative journey. I’ve found that it’s been a part of my journey too, in moments when a particular resource or connection I need seems to suddenly appear out of nowhere. When we learn to trust these moments and follow the messages they give us, it can lead to unexpected and positive outcomes to enhance our awareness of synchronicity can be useful to keep a journal of coincidences and intuitive insights as they emerge, reflecting on these entries regularly, we can begin to see how they connect with our creative journey. And the more we practise recognising synchronicity, the more we can tune into its presence in our life.

Building Community

Creativity thrives in a supportive environment, while individual practises like morning pages and artist dates are essential. Having a community of people to share with also provides invaluable encouragement and feedback. Cameron emphasises the importance of community and nurturing our creative spirits. Finding or starting a supportive group can take several forms. You could join a local writing group, meditation class, or a creative workshop. There are also online forums where you can share and network with other creatives around the world. Sharing your work with others and getting feedback is a really good way to grow as a creative—constructive feedback can help you hone your craft and boost your confidence and motivation. Being part of a community also provides an opportunity to collaborate, learn from others and be inspired.

Living the Artist’s Way

Integrating the practises from The Artist’s Way into your daily life is a gradual process that requires commitment and consistency. But the rewards of a more creative and fulfilling life are well worth the effort. Start with a morning routine that includes morning pages. This exercise sets you up positively for the day and clears your mind so you can approach your creative work with a fresh perspective. Combine this with weekly artist appointments to ensure you’re regularly engaging in activities that inspire and rejuvenate you. It can be challenging to balance creativity and other life commitments, but it’s important that you prioritise your own creative pursuits.

Start small and build consistency over time. The key is to create a sustainable routine that supports your creative growth without overwhelming you. The Artist’s Way provides a comprehensive 12-week framework for unlocking your creative potential, and there’s much more you can learn from the book. The impact of these exercises is profound, and as you embark on this journey, remember that creativity isn’t a destination, but a continual process of growth and exploration.

In The Path of Mindful Living: A 21-Day Mindfulness Companion, I lead you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and show you how to bring mindfulness into your daily life. Readers of Integrative Creativity can download the workbook and pullout charts for only £6.

How I’m Reading 100 Books in 2024

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Allan Johnson in creativity, habits, intention, Observations

Reading has always been more than just a pastime for me — it’s my passion and my whole world. To misquote Barbie‘s Ken: my job is books. But perhaps somewhat surprisingly, in the hustle and bustle of my day job as an English literature academic, the sheer joy of reading for pleasure has fallen by the wayside. In order to get back to the joys of simply reading for pleasure I have set myself a challenge to read 100 books in 2024.

I read a lot as it is, but as there is so much more out there that I want to consume and enjoy I am challenging myself to read a lot this year. Nearly twice as much as I read last year. And, just to be clear, the 100 books are those that I am reading for pleasure–not the many more books that I will also be reading just for work.

I’m feeling pretty confident that I can meet this challenge because I already have a lot of strategies that have always helped me read a huge amount for my job. While these tips and tricks have been helpful to me as an English academic over the years, this year I am repurposing them for my own benefit to make sure that I am reading the stuff that I want to read for pleasure this year.

Here are some tips on how you can read 100 books (or 52, or 25, or 12, or whatever!) in 2024:

Keeping a TBR List: In order to navigate all the fantastic books that you have in store for you, keeping track of your To-Be-Read (TBR) list is paramount. My strategy is to use Goodreads as a comprehensive tool to keep track of the books I want to read, am currently immersed in, and have completed. This not only simplifies the reading process, but also provides a rewarding visualisation of progress and turns the literary journey into a tangible adventure.
Multitasking the reading experience: The key to an enriching reading experience lies in variety and having several books on the go at once ensures flexibility: if I don’t like one book, there’s another waiting for me. As I take a cross-platform approach, I juggle between a printed book, a Kindle and an audiobook. This ensures that, whatever the mood or situation, I always have a literary companion at hand to transport me to other worlds.
Notes as a ritual of immersion: For a devoted bibliophile, reading goes beyond the act itself. It becomes an immersive ritual where you internalise the essence of each book. My simple note-taking system consists of underlining or highlighting key passages and then summarising the book in my Goodreads reviews to create a tangible connection with the material. It’s a practise that goes beyond just finishing a book; it’s about creating a record of what you’ve completed
Giving up the unappealing: One of the liberating facets of my reading challenge is that I allow myself the freedom to give up on a book after the first 50 pages if it doesn’t captivate me. Life is too short to force yourself through something that you don’t vibe with. This ensures that each book contributes to the pleasure of reading rather than becoming a chore.
Visibility and accountability: When you resolve to read a hundred books in a year, visibility becomes a powerful accountability tool. Platforms like Goodreads are no longer just personal logbooks, but become public statements of commitment. This visibility acts as a subtle motivator, a gentle reminder that the literary journey is shared and that milestones should be celebrated together.

For me the challenge of reading 100 books in one year is not just about sheer quantity, but about rediscovering the joy of reading for pleasure. You can track my progress and share your own reading adventures on Goodreads — a virtual place where fellow literature lovers come together to celebrate the magic of books!

In The Path of Mindful Living: A 21-Day Mindfulness Companion, I lead you through a series of self-guided mindfulness exercises and show you how to bring mindfulness into your daily life. Readers of my blog can download the workbook and pullout charts for only £6.

Research Workflow for Academics: The Best of Digital and Analogue Working Together

Posted on September 9, 2014October 13, 2014 by Allan Johnson in Productivity, Research, The Profession

In his presentation at the ‘Humanities Computing: Formal Methods, Experimental Practice’ symposium at King’s College London in 2000, John Unsworth described the seven ‘scholarly primitives’, that is, the ‘basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation’:

Discovering
Annotating
Comparing
Referring
Sampling
Illustrating
Representing

A similar taxonomy was described by Ernest Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Boyer’s model of scholarship refers to four interrelated areas of practice: ‘the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching.’ While the nature of scholarly work hasn’t changed much since Unsworth’s and Boyer’s observations, the way in which we go about it and the goals that we hope to meet by completing it certainly have.

The workflow that I use for my academic research draws upon Boyer’s model of scholarship and Unsworth’s scholarly primitives, and aims to both isolate the individual components of scholarly work while recognising the inherent relationship and necessary overlap between these components. In order to meet these aims, I needed a workflow that fulfilled several requirements:

Assign tasks to the platform best designed for that task. Evernote is excellent for taking notes, for example, but doesn’t stand up well to PDF management.
Integrate analogue components at suitable points. I love notebooks and pens so this is largely a personal preference, but considerable research shows longhand writing aids in memory and comprehension.
Create a frictionless system that allows for collaboration. When working with collaborators or research assistants, the workflow can be opened up at strategic points, while still offering privacy.
Exist in the cloud. My academic writing takes place in my office, at home, and on the road; it happens on computers, iPads, and iPhones. I need to be able to reach everything securely in the cloud and across multiple platforms.
Look visually appealing, and capture content in a visually appealing way. This isn’t just about aesthetics. Visual appeal is a significant aspect of the success of digital spaces.

As it turns out, these five objectives are often at odds with one another. Creating a frictionless system (#3) is easiest if only one programme is used, but then there will likely be tasks that are not suited to that programme (#1) (this is often the issue when all aspects of research and writing live exclusively in Scrivener or Evernote). If the workflow exists securely in the cloud (#4), then it seems counterintuitive to involve analogue components (#2).

The workflow that I use takes the best of digital and analogue research and puts it into an adaptable, frictionless, and appealing system. I begin by uploading articles to Papers and cleaning up metadata. As I read the article in Papers, I highlight important passages, but keep my written notes and commentary separately in longhand form in my notebook. With a clever shortcut in Papers (⌃⇧C), I can copy the full citation, all highlighted text, and associated page numbers of these highlights. This is then pasted into a new Evernote note along with the link to the article in Papers (Edit > Copy As > Papers Link). In both Papers and Evernote I rely on the same tagging conventions.

The outputs of this workflow are important: 1) PDFs continue to livein Papers where they can be organised, tagged, and read in the most efficient way, 2) notes live in Evernote where they add to a growing commonplace book of research, and 3) commentary and ideas for future research live in a notebook where I can reflect upon them at a later point. Of course, any workflow should stay flexible–already I am considering moving from Word to Scrivener for drafting, and from Papers to Mendeley for PDF management–but no matter how this workflow continues to evolve, it will always accept the distinctiveness of each component of scholarly work while acknowledging the necessary overlapping between these components.

15 Flags: How I Create Habits for Writing

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Allan Johnson in Productivity

I am constantly searching for ways to better integrate my digital life into the world of paper, pens, and printed materials that I still love (here, here, and here). Although there are countless apps available to help create and track new habits–many of which gamify the traditional 21-days rule of habit formation with some very fun results–I have found the best way for me to track my habits is with a stack of sticky flags and my Moleskine.

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Refining Technique in Academic Writing

Posted on March 31, 2014March 31, 2014 by Allan Johnson in Observations, Research, Teaching

Typewriters

I wrote briefly last week about the importance of technique in academic writing. Academic writing is, above all else, a specialised form of communication, which remains true whether we are teaching essay writing to first year students or working on a journal article addressing our research. Articles, essays, theses, and dissertations are all modes of communication that serve to share with readers how we have approached our topic and the conclusions to which we have come. And the success of this communication is dependent each writer’s display of technical mastery. This does not, of course, mean mindlessly following the model, although many writing teachers would agree that is preferable to write with good technique and be a bit monotonous than to write with no technique and lose the reader from the outset.

The aim of good technique is to create a fluid and organic microcosmic structure. What this means is, simply: 1) each paragraph is a self-contained unit, 2) which contributes to the argument of its individual section, 3) which contributes to the argument of its chapter, 4) which contributes to the argument of the work as a whole. No matter the length of the writing, these key building blocks will always stay the same, and should always help your reader to enter into your analysis with the tools to engage meaningfully with what you have to say.

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Developing Student Self-Reflexivity In Secondary Source Research

Posted on July 8, 2013July 8, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

Library Word Find Puzzle #2 — (Photo credit: herzogbr)

Yesterday I wrote about how I introduce secondary source research to students. Those 7 questions, are, of course, only the starting point for helping students to get the full benefit from engaging with the work of other thinkers.

When our students are working with secondary source material in their writing, we should be encouraging them to use their sources to explicitly support, develop, or refine their own argument. We sometimes forget that student writers can become part of the wider critical conversation on a topic. By helping them to use their sources to develop their argument, rather than simply reiterating the arguments of others, we can help them to enter that conversation as well.

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7 Questions to Help Students Use and Understand Secondary Sources

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

May 2009: Academic Writing & ESL Resources Display — (Photo credit: tclibrary)

The university-level study of English is paradoxically both an individual and collaborative effort, with students developing their own analytical skills while simultaneously learning to think in collaborative ways with tutors and fellow students. What this paradox demonstrates, of course, is that communicating with those around you plays a significant role in the development of ideas, including communicating with the critical body of material surrounding the topic (even if the line of communication is, in this case, distinctly one-way).

Academic writing, even at the most introductory level, is not created in a vacuum. Indeed, any piece of writing that students produce will be be a conglomeration of voices—some contemporary, some more distant—and their success in that writing will be dependent upon how well they harness this mass.

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4 Tags That Make Sense of It All: Best Practice for Tagging Academic Notes

Posted on December 27, 2012January 11, 2014 by Allan Johnson in Productivity

Tighening Up Some Flabby Prose

Posted on December 19, 2012July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Research

With all of this semester’s exam scripts marked and off my desk, I have finally begun to read the books that have been piling up in my Kindle over the past semester. (On second thought, can eBooks ‘pile up’? Surely we need a new metaphor in the digital age.) One that I have particularly enjoyed is Helen Sword‘s Stylish Academic Writing. Far from an abstracted treatise on writing (as so many advanced academic writing texts are), Sword’s work highlights both the finest and guiltiest features of contemporary academic prose and uses these examples to demonstrate practical techniques for better writing.

The companion website to Sword’s earlier book The Writer’s Diet (unfortunately not available on Amazon.co.uk) offers a diagnostic tool to check the ‘flabbiness’ of prose. The diagnosis of several pages from a recent article of mine was not entirely positive. My writing, it seems, is a bit overwhelmed by adjectives and abstract nouns, but, then, so is a great deal of recent academic writing (see below). So my resolution for 2013 is to make my concrete nouns work harder, because up until this point they have been getting a free ride from my favourite adjectives.

Is there an epidemic of plural abstract nouns? (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
Seven secrets of stylish academic writing (frugalfashionistachic.wordpress.com)
Website helps writers determine the ‘fitness’ of their prose (prdaily.com)

Win One Year of Evernote Premium

Posted on December 3, 2012December 3, 2012 by Allan Johnson in Uncategorized

evernote-ambassador-photo-green-lg

I have been using Evernote since the early days of my PhD (see how I get Kindle notes into Evernote for my teaching), so I was thrilled when they invited me to be their Higher Education Ambassador. Starting today I will get to do lots of cool stuff with them–a bit of traveling, a bit of writing, a bit of speaking. Awesome!

So, to mark the occasion, I have some great Evernote stuff to give away. Here’s how you can get it:

To enter, respond to the following question in the comments at the bottom of this post: ‘How do you organize your teaching, research, and writing? Paper, digital, post-its? File folders, shoe boxes, digital tablets?’ Everyone has their own system–what is yours?

This isn’t just for academics, but for anyone who writes, thinks, doodles, ponders, pilfers, or philosophizes. And there are some great prizes to be won…

First Prize: One Year of Evernote Premium (value $45)
Second Prize: 3 Months of Evernote Premium (value $15)
Third Prize: Evernote Sticker Pack (value $5) + Evernote Sticky Screen Wipes (value $5)

Entries close at 11:59pm GMT on 12 December 2012 and winners will be chosen randomly from all entries on 13 December 2012. Make sure that you include your e-mail address when you comment so I can contact you.