A Georgetown University graduate whose writing for the Washington Post’s Style section led to a life-changing call from a Rolling Stone editor in the 1970s, Julia Cameron says her early career “was an IOU to Washington, D.C.”

Inspired by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate, she wrote a feature for Rolling Stone, “Life Without Father,” on E. Howard Hunt’s family. (Hunt planned the Watergate break-in that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.) As Cameron tells City Paper, Hunt’s children were so cooperative that the experience taught her not to predict the story before she wrote it, “but to explore what was actually there” and on her interview subjects’ minds. Her advice to journalists itching to lay down a lede: “Don’t be too certain of your direction before you start. Be open minded.”

This also is wise guidance for your future. No matter how exactingly you plan, or don’t, the universe has a way of blowing plans up. Leaving D.C. in 1974, she moved to Los Angeles and eventually New York, marrying twice and raising a daughter from her first marriage. 

In 1992, originally intended as a hymn to healing, came Cameron’s classic book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. At first, she thought she was writing it for herself and a dozen friends. But she began to mail copies to people who requested it, and soon it became apparent that “there was much more of a demand for the book than I had realized,” she says. Today the book has sold more than 5 million copies in 40 languages.

Now living Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cameron is the proud creator of dozens of books, poems, songs, films, and plays. This Saturday, Jan. 7, Cameron joins her editor, Joel Fotino, for an online writing workshop through Politics and Prose that she hopes will give participants a sense of optimism, tenacity, and empowerment. (“I probably sound a little bit like Tony Robbins right now,” she dryly remarks, pivoting from promotion to soul on a dime.) Each ticket includes a copy of her latest book, Write for Life: Creative Tools for Every Writer.

“I wanted to write a book that would encourage people and would give them a sense of hope,” Cameron says. “We have a mythology that tells us that writing is difficult, and I wanted to say, no, it’s life sustaining.” 

In Write for Life, out Jan. 10, she suggests that writers need only one quality for success. Not look-at-me brilliance, but honesty. “When I write, I ask myself always, ‘Am I being honest? Am I being authentic? Am I being of service?’ These three questions, answered in the affirmative, yield me a piece of writing that withstands scrutiny,” Cameron writes in her new book. “The same will be true for you.”

The famed primary tool she introduced in The Artist’s Way—the morning pages—comprises three pages of longhand morning writing. “It teaches us to be candid, it teaches us to be brave, it teaches us to be vulnerable, it teaches us to be authentic,” she tells City Paper. “If you have a project that you want to finish, try writing morning pages. And see if that doesn’t lead you forward.”

These days, Cameron is composing yet another new book and finds herself enjoying the writing. “When I get a page, I feel exuberant,” she says. When asked what color that emotion is to her, she says, “Exuberance to me is an effervescent green.” 

Thirty years after The Artist’s Way was published, inspiring writers across the world, interviews, podcasts, and profiles with Cameron still spring up across the internet. The final word for City Paper is hers:

“I want to say that I love to write, and that I hope my love of writing is contagious. And if it’s contagious, I hope that it urges people to go forward. And I think if you think you want to write, then you should write. And trying to encourage people to believe in themselves is sort of my message. To trust yourself. Believe in yourself. Believe in your work.”

Julia Cameron’s virtual writing workshop begins at 4 p.m. on Dec. 7 at Politics and Prose. politics-prose.com. $60.