The cost of pursuing creativity

[HareBrain]

"Passion is suffering, and maybe we need to stop romanticising that suffering." That quote comes from this YouTube video, which is based around an analysis of the Studio Ghibli animated film Whisper of the Heart (which is available on Netflix). I'd encourage people to watch both. The film is probably the best visual story I've seen about the creative drive.

I've been meaning to start a thread like this for a while. As some here know, I've had a mild case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for the past decade or so, which (except at first) has never been very debilitating, but which has certainly stopped me doing some of the things I loved. What it never stopped me doing was writing, though it often meant I could do less than I wanted. I'd always attributed this energy breakdown to overtraining at running in 2011, but recently I've had cause to re-evaluate that, and I now think that the self-inflicted pressures I felt as a writer have been more responsible than I thought.

These pressures can be summed up as "wanting my writing to get somewhere". Quite what this "somewhere" was remained vague, but it definitely involved being published and reaching a decent number of readers. The more I worried that this didn't seem likely to happen, the more I fretted about everything in the stories being as perfect as I could get it, so as not to hamper their already slim chances. Because I tend to have complex plots, there was a lot of stress about everything tying up and all the arcs reaching a satisfying conclusion, and so on. I wanted my work to fit every piece of convincing-sounding writing advice I'd ever come across, even where it conflicted with other advice.

Since realising the extent of these pressures over the summer, I've tried to retrain myself to focus only on the writing itself, and put off any thoughts about what might happen to it in the end. It has been difficult to stop my mind wandering to aspects of future marketing or target audiences, and I know that eventually those things will probably have to be tackled. But I'm hoping that by that stage I will have recovered some of my energy, and I might have retrained myself well enough so that I can look on the eventual fate of the stories out in the wide world as less consequential than their existence. It seems to have worked to some extent: my energy has improved slightly, and I no longer browse the SFF or YA shelves in a bookshop with a feeling of panic that my stories just don't belong on them.

I'm not sure we talk about this kind of thing enough. Talking with friends has shown me I'm not the only one who has this kind of conflicted relationship with writing. Perhaps we think it's a bit weird to talk about the negative aspects of something we do entirely voluntarily, but is creativity truly voluntary? Scott (in the video) is correct that there's a romantic idea that any sacrifice is worthwhile to pursue a true passion, but that probably jars against the everyday life pressures of almost every artist.

I think it's healthy to come to some kind of accommodation with the possibility that our creative dreams might not be fulfilled. I don't think I've reached that accommodation yet; I've just put off thinking about it. Maybe some here always had much more realistic dreams in the first place. I'd be interested to hear what you think.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I think it’s easy to get over focused on perfection to the detriment of both enjoyment and flow. I’m finding lengthy writing hard at the mo but am actively enjoying something non fiction to work on. Our brains need a break too, I guess

 

[HareBrain]

I think it’s easy to get over focused on perfection to the detriment of both enjoyment and flow.

I'm not sure I'll ever really get rid of my desire for (close to) perfection. But at least now it's with the aim of producing something I can be satisfied with, rather than because I think it's necessary to maximise its chances in the market.

 

[Ambrose]

I used to have a small card pinned up on my wall. It said:
'Write for yourself alone. Whisper in thine own ear. Then, if you are fortunate, you may have eavesdroppers'.
I've lost the card and don't recall the source, but it was good advice.

 

[Montero]

I have a particular soft spot for three books which I suspect were a passion project for the authors - they've written either very little or nothing else - and I think they spent a lot of time getting it very, very right. And then somehow got a traditional publisher, who may have been rather startled when nothing else was produced. I'm due a re-read on several of them, so may find that they are not as good as I remember. One I re-read last year was "A Rumor of Gems" by Ellen Steiber

 

[msstice]

I have a particular soft spot for three books which I suspect were a passion project for the authors - they've written either very little or nothing else - and I think they spent a lot of time getting it very, very right. And then somehow got a traditional publisher, who may have been rather startled when nothing else was produced. I'm due a re-read on several of them, so may find that they are not as good as I remember. One I re-read last year was "A Rumor of Gems" by Ellen Steiber

To Kill A Mockingbird was a one off, I think. That other book in 2015 from her I haven't read and that failed publicity stunt around it made me think someone was taking advantage of her advanced years.

 

[AnRoinnUltra]

I don't think it's weird to talk about the negative aspects of writing, it might be something that's not mentioned enough during creative writing courses. It's definitely there though. I came to writing late and don't harbour any real ambition of being properly published, but at the same time get frustrated with the stories just dying a death and can well imagine your frustration.
The thing is I think the reaction or where the work goes has no real impact on the art -it's probably better to get no pressure from readers/ publishers when writing anyway. You'd still be doing what you are doing even if you were Sally Rooney (though you'd probably have more time to go about it).
It might be worth quantifying what that 'somewhere' you mentioned is. Just so it's a different thing and doesn't hamper your writing. Then possibly set aside a half hour or hour a week dedicated to achieving that.
In any case, I reckon it's not easy -I dunno if trying to forget markets etc. is good if that is your eventual aim. I'd say keep thinking about them if it is, but give it a budget of processing time In any case it's not easy -if it was everyone would be at it.

 

[msstice]

I used to have a small card pinned up on my wall. It said:
'Write for yourself alone. Whisper in thine own ear. Then, if you are fortunate, you may have eavesdroppers'.
I've lost the card and don't recall the source, but it was good advice.

This came up in a websearch A quote by Cyril Connolly and seems to fit well:

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. (Cyril Connolly)​

 

[Robert Zwilling]

There are many reasons why books sell. Some of them having nothing to do with what was written, which can sometimes make it seem easier than it is to have people read what you write.

If you really don't care if your book gets read from the start then you can avoid what can become a very perplexing situation. Sometimes a book is written and it is supposed to have important information or an important story that supposedly people should read. But nobody reads it.

An author can either accept the situation, ignore the situation, try to change it, or get entangled in it.

Artists like to use their own methods of expression, which can result in their works never being popular, or perhaps becoming popular long after they die. Amazon doesn't stop publishing a book if the author dies because it is a bank account for people to deposit money in. If you publish on amazon, you have chance of being read at some point in time.

If you write a book without personally having a huge public following, it could be very tough to get people to see it. One way to overcome this is to spend an excessive amount of money on publicity. Sometimes people think that they can use the money from book sales to pay for publicity. This is like putting the cart before the horse. It takes a lot of money to publicize an unknown author's unknown book.

What can be maddening is that there are specific steps that can be followed to get free publicity on social media which sometimes work out quite well. But most of the time it doesn't work. That's probably because besides doing the steps, the timing of those steps is incredibly important, and the timing is almost always off, perhaps connected to random events, so the steps don't build off each other.

Another thing could be that it takes talent to get a social media following, and perhaps that talent is not related to the acts being done that people are seeing. A person with show biz talent could probably sell anything, not just what they are currently selling. That means if an author is doing a bang up job selling their book on line, then perhaps they could also be selling other things besides the book, the book is just another thing to sell.

This analogy sometimes insults authors, but I think it is more than an analogy. An author's chance of writing a book a lot of people read is similar to garage bands chances of becoming overnight sensations with huge followings, that being next to nil. They are both using creative efforts to reach a large audience. Authors like to think the words they write are very important, but sometimes it's just the flow of energy that gets noticed.

When a book doesn't take off, some people write another one, and another one, and another one. This could be a case of either repeating the same formula, or searching for a formula story line that works and gets people's attention. Reading can be similar to taking drugs to escape from reality. Formula writing can provide a readable drug that people like. In this case, the readable drug is based on proven formulas which may not be very creative or artistic, but make people happy, or at least contented. Trying to reshape a working formula that people like, such as inserting messages, can easily result in the formula failing to work. That's because it is the formula selling the book, not the message.

If you like being creative, there is always the possibility of trying a different medium besides writing.

For my artwork, I have found that the less personal it is, the better it sells, but that's just my experience.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

It is impossible to be creative in a human vacuum. Creativity is an individual's response to reality, but, human beings as they are, it's impossible not to share. In fact, there's good evidence that what an artist does is reach out to other people to show them in the public world what their world feels like from the inside. Nicholas Humphrey argues persuasively that that is what having subjective feelings is all about - that we're making bridges between ourselves and others. That being the case, all art, including writing, will receive an audience. It might be an audience of 1, but that still makes it a transition from subjective and private to objective and public.
There is really only one answer to this artists' dilemma. You have to "own" (to use the modern expression) your own creativity. You have to find the confidence to say: this really is how I imagined and wanted it. That's not easy. It's fraught with perils: embarrassment, shame, regret, anger. But in the end it's the only satisfying response to the dilemma.
As the great Gene Wolfe observed, perfection is not sexy. Indeed, to generalise, excellence is not sexy. Character, on the other hand - character with flaws, but sincerely and ingeniously presented, and in reasonable prose - is sexy. And that's a pretty good feeling.

 

[ColGray]

Writing, like any creative pursuit, is about choices. Are you writing for yourself, or for an audience? Are you writing for ten people or for thousands? And either is okay -- it's okay to be creative for yourself. It's okay want to be paid for your art--Shakespeare wrote for money!

I used to be shy about saying, I write scifi, knowing that many people look down on that as "genre". Shawn Coyne's Story Grid helped cure me of that pre-embarrassment. Genre, he said, is shorthand for reader expectations. Regardless of the specific genre--ChicLit, Thriller, Literature, or Scifi--readers have expectations based on the genre. He was a very successful Big5 editor running Thriller imprints and he used the example of, If you tell me you wrote a Thriller but refused to have Hero at the Mercy of the Villain scene, I'll tell you your thriller doesn't work. Because your readers expect that. They expect you to subvert the genre, not reject it.

Annie Dillard is the other writer who got me out of my own head when it came to writing. (If you haven't read, For the Time Being, Pilgrim at TinkerCreek, Living by Fiction, or The Writing Life do yourself a favor and find them.)

Two quotes from her have stuck with me:

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Painting has "before" and "after" periods; literature does not. Young painters must look forward; young writers may look around.

Cut off from both an audience and an agreed upon set of traditional values, pushed out of a plane, a free falling painter may wriggle any way he chooses, repeating, "They laughed at Manet, they laughed at Renoir"; but the air is very thin. If the remote and aristocratic painter can do no wrong, he can also do no right. And no one is laughing now.

 

[HareBrain]

Writing, like any creative pursuit, is about choices. Are you writing for yourself, or for an audience? Are you writing for ten people or for thousands?

I'm not sure about that. How many writers actually choose between such alternatives? Isn't the most likely "choice" conditional: ten people if it doesn't get picked up for publication, possibly thousands if it does? Getting trad published isn't a decision, it's a lottery where your writing choices can influence how many tickets you get.

Contrast this with, say, painting. If I produced enough work and forked over a certain amount of cash, I could have a display at a local art gallery and guarantee a certain number of viewers. That would be a choice, and it wouldn't depend on whether I was painting largely for my own satisfaction or specifically for an audience (which might influence how many I sold, but not so much who would see it). In long-form writing, to a large extent you don't get an audience until you've made a sale -- and there's a huge amount of luck involved in that.

So I guess you can make the choice to write in such a way that maximises your number of tickets. I think the "choice" I've made is to write for myself in the hope that others will also like my stories, without having any real idea how many of those "others" there might me, which isn't really a choice at all. I suspect that's quite common.

 

[ColGray]

Yeah, i think you nailed it -- it's lottery tickets, but also, you're choosing to pursue those lottery tickets. Either side of that equation is fine.

IME, the choosing happens during editing. Is my WC in the right range? Can this find an audience? Is the first 300 words hook-ish, etc.

I think the only perspective I struggle with is, I only write for myself. Unless its a diary, "I write with 0 intention of ever sharing it" feels fake and reminds me of teenagers smoking cloves and quoting Ginsberg and Kerouac, telling everyone they write and expecting someone to push them, to beg them, to read their work.

Or was that just my experiences in the early 2000's...

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

More a composer/songwriter than a writer here, but I've found I make more and better art when I'm not suffering for it. There was a period of at least 10 years when I was so twisted up with perfectionism and questions of worth and "acceptable" style, I was lucky if I squeezed out two short, crappy pieces a year. And as The Suffering impeded my output so much, I never did enough work to improve. I managed to change my attitude drastically - it helped that I moved into an area of music I had less ego tied up in. I still care about quality, but in a practical way - I don't worry whether something is fundamentally worthy, I just tinker with it until it works. I now have single months that are twice as productive as that lost decade.

 

[ColGray]

I now have single months that are twice as productive as that lost decade.

That's really interesting. I stopped writing for about a decade because i was both underwhelmed with what I'd written and found I had little to say. Just a lot of ego and thinking, If it doesn't measure up today, it never will.

What made me start writing again was having an infant going through pediatric cancer treatment and needing to both process that anxiety/fear/stress and share updates with friends and family--in short, suffering. The Caringbridge stretched across seven years and grew to have people we'd never met, who didn't know us or our daughter, reading it. And when she passed, strangers reached out-- which was incredible, but bizarre. Having people complement your writing at calling hours, your dead child feet away, is surreal--you're this broken thing with an ego cramming every morsel into it's ravenous maw, telling you this is amazing. People suggested I package it up as a memoir and I've said no because it isn't art, it's suffering. I had to politely ask friends and family to stop sending me memoirs because, Yes, Rob Delaney is funny, but reading about someone else's journey to a dead child isn't entertaining or motivating and healing for me-- it's suffering.

But also, I started writing for pleasure again while I was in a hospital room with her and couldn't sleep. I found my voice and got over whether i had something to say because holy sh*t, look at where you are! Look at what's happening! Whatever you say isn't that important! Seeing actual suffering stripped the ego out and let me just... be.

But it's not a fair trade.

 

[Lacedaemonian]

I write to please myself and maybe a handful of people I love and respect. That said, I have not written anything meaningful in terms of word count or effort. I imagine the scale of the endeavour changes your values/ambitions somewhat. Maybe I am projecting my own philosophy here, so please feel free to rubbish this if you feel it isn't true, but I always feel like I owe the characters in my stories or poems the perfect story. And I get the impression that this is true of many artists. They invest almost everything they have into that one album, that one movie, that one novel.

@HareBrain I think you are an incredible writer. How much of that is down to you putting yourself through the mill in pursuit of perfect prose and technically brilliant structure though? I mean the story has to flow. However, I don't think that is what makes you a great writer. Your ability to create places that resonate somehow across temporal lines; in a childhood memory and within an adult reality. Multidimensional characters with incredible depth. The prose and the structure etc are just vehicles to deliver these people and places and ultimately their story out into the world.

 

[HareBrain]

I always feel like I owe the characters in my stories or poems the perfect story

Yes, I think this is definitely true of me, and increasingly so the longer I live with them. (And thanks for your generous words.)

@ColGray , that was a wonderful post.

 

[Toby Frost]

I've found I make more and better art when I'm not suffering for it.

I would go along with this, in a way. Some of the stuff I've written recently - most of it unpublished - reflects negative things that seem to be on the rise in society: corruption, tyranny, general-purpose fear and a sort of poisonous, self-righteous fury. But to write properly about such things requires the time and capacity to do so. I need to be able to write a first draft and then carefully edit it, which can't be done anywhere near as well if the circumstances are intrusive or if I can't think straight. The stereotype of a writer banging out prose in a white heat of emotion may or may not be accurate, but editing needs to be done with a clear head, in comfortable surroundings.

 

[Astro Pen]

Some of the stuff I've written recently - most of it unpublished - reflects negative things that seem to be on the rise in society: corruption, tyranny, general-purpose fear and a sort of poisonous, self-righteous fury.

Thank you @Toby Frost . You are not alone in that.
I particularly like the term "general-purpose fear".

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

I would go along with this, in a way. Some of the stuff I've written recently - most of it unpublished - reflects negative things that seem to be on the rise in society: corruption, tyranny, general-purpose fear and a sort of poisonous, self-righteous fury. But to write properly about such things requires the time and capacity to do so. I need to be able to write a first draft and then carefully edit it, which can't be done anywhere near as well if the circumstances are intrusive or if I can't think straight. The stereotype of a writer banging out prose in a white heat of emotion may or may not be accurate, but editing needs to be done with a clear head, in comfortable surroundings.

Come to think of it, I have written plenty of angry songs about real life. And as you say, there's a certain degree of detachment while working them up to a usable state. I guess what I was really trying to say is that if the artistic process itself involves suffering, it grinds to a halt. If it doesn't, I can continue creating when other things are making me suffer.