A Week of Girl Unplugging
The Joys Born of Deprivation
As April marked “Week 4” of The Artist’s Way Study Group here in Stop Writing Alone, I was challenged to set up an optimal time for one of the most resisted tasks of the program: Reading Deprivation Week.
The Resistance & The Commitment
In chapter 4 of The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron asks us to stop reading for one entire week, including social media. I have taken on this challenge a number of times, but this year was the greatest personal resistance I felt toward it. As the month rolled by I found myself happily immersed in a number of new-to-me books that I was not interested in putting on hold. I was re-reading Death of a Salesman for the first time as an adult for our Story Club, and the audiobook I was listening to for my local book club was one of those that I had to keep pausing just so I could run into another room to share a juicy morsel with my husband. This was all after what had felt like a very long reading drought for me.
I let the weeks pass. I did not take on Reading Deprivation Week. I even hosted the “Week 4” study group and I still had not done the work. However, a couple of nights before the meeting I re-read that chapter and I was reminded of how committed to this task Julia Cameron was. She put a warning about not skipping it in the beginning of the chapter, long before she even explains what it is!
It was because of that warning that I commited to taking a Reading Depreviation Week during the week I had scheduled no meetings because of my family’s Spring Break. On April 21st (two days after I planned on beginning! — I was SO resistant!) I took to Instagram and Facebook, posted the image above with an explanation in the caption. I then deleted the Instagram and Facebook apps off my phone and got to living differently.
How I Filled My Time
I am not the only screen addict in my family — my husband is a major Call of Duty fan and my son loves to split his time between coding on Scratch Jr. and creating and playing games on his Nintendo Switch. I knew, if I was not proactive about tackling Spring Break, I was setting myself up for a week and a half of twiddling my thumbs with nothing to read and no humans to hang with. This is what inspired “The List.”
I had no aspirations of finishing the list, but I wanted to present ideas to my screen lovers that were “other.” I am pleased to say that, after initial resistance,
the list became a family-wide hit. In the end, we checked off 19 items and my son has requested that I don’t erase the list just because vacation is over. He wants us to keep going!
However, even with all of this activity, the boys still found their screeen time, and I found myself twiddling my thumbs every now and again, which is great, because that’s when the Reading Deprivation Week works its best creative magic.
What do you do when you revisit the land of boredom?
Reading Deprivation Week is, I believe, a task to reignite our relationship with boredom. As a kid and a teenager I thrived in the world of boredom, and it is, I think, to be given most credit for any and all of my artistic pursuits. However, in the 21st Century, how many opportunities does one have to get bored anymore unless you force yourself into it?
So I was bored, and I filled those times with two activies. One is pretty close to the same mind-numbing screen scrolling I am used to, but the other was a wonderful step forward in my writing life.
NYTimes Games, especially SUDOKU. Every single day this week I exhausted all of the free games available to me on my NYTimes Games app.
Connections (this game is always played WITH my husband)
all three games (Easy, Medium, and Hard) of SUDOKU
occassional forays into BETA games to play STRANDS
My new digital toy, ATTICUS, paired with my continued writing experiment Girl, Unplugged.
How The Girl, Unplugged Experiment Continues…
Girl, Unplugged is a young adult novel that I drafted in 2012, entered into PitchWars 2016, and finished rewriting somewhere in 2018. It is a novel and world I have loved, not only for the creation of it, but for all the ways it has taken me to new corners of the writing world. It began as a NaNoWriMo novel, became a Camp NaNoWriMo editting project, and won me a spot and a mentor (author Austin Aslan) in the Twitter-based pitch contest PitchWars, and, ultimately, became my first serialized fiction project here on Substack (see my Story Hoarder page!).
However, upon completing the release of the novel on Story Hoarder, I realized the journey was nowhere near finished, for two particular reasons:
People were requesting a pdf version
I had promised myself once I finished the Story Hoarder release, I would self-publish the novel to sell.
And, so, while I was reading deprived and bored out of my mind, I started to think about this very fun project as something I could enjoy doing. I could work on GIrl, Unplugged during the exact week I found myself as a girl unplugged!
The Results
In the end, I can do nothing but applaud Reading Deprivation Week. Although the Girl, Unplugged project has been noodling around as a “thing I have to get to” in the back of my brain for months, I can honestly say I was doing about it until last week. And, yes, I did sort of “break the rules” of Reading Deprivation Week by reading my own novel, but my approach to all things The Artist’s Way is to embrace the spirit of the lessons within, and I think this activity is exactly the type of thing that Julia Cameron hopes her students uncover in the program.
I am elated to say that I believe I am only days away from the pdf release of the novel for those of you who are uninterested in reading 90K+ words in Substack. I am also incredibly happy to say that I am learning all about this new program (Atticus) and part of the publishing process with my Girl, Unplugged experiment. You can be sure that I will have much more to share about all of it soon.
For now, here’s a look at the current cover:
Questions? Comments?
While I plan to dribble out information and lessons learned, I am curious about what questions or comments you may have about this process so far — whether it’s about The Artist’s Way, the Atticus software, Girl, Unplugged or anything else addressed in this post. Let me know in the comments what you are curious about!
I don’t think I could undertake a reading deprivation week—good for you! And I love the list!