If I were just starting out writing, say, a novel or a screenplay, or maybe starting up a new software company or an online retail business, I wouldn’t try to quit my job in order to make this big, dramatic, heroic-quest thing about it. I would do something far simpler: I would find that extra hour or two in the day that belongs to nobody else but me, and I would make it productive. Put the hours in, do it for long enough, and magical, life-transforming things happen eventually. Sure, that means less time watching TV, Internet surfing, going out to dinner, or whatever. But who cares?
Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the “creative bug” is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”
You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else’s voice but your own
Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it.
Which is why there are so many crappy photographers with state-of-the-art digital cameras. Which is why there are so many unremarkable painters with expensive studios in trendy neighborhoods. Hiding behind pillars, all of them. Pillars do not help; they hinder. The more mighty the pillar, the more you end up relying on it psychologically, the more it gets in your way.
It’s this same Pissed Off Gene that makes us want to create anything in the first place—drawings, violin sonatas, meat packing companies, Web sites. This same gene drove us to discover how to make a fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, indoor plumbing, the personal computer, the list is endless. Part of understanding the creative urge is understanding that it’s primal. Wanting to change the world is not a noble calling, it’s a primal calling.
In fact we’re just pissed off and want to get the hell out of the cave and kill the woolly mammoth. Your business either lets you go hunt the woolly mammoth or it doesn’t. Of course, as with so many white-collar jobs these days, you might very well be offered a ton of money to sit in the corner-office cave and pretend that you’re hunting, even if you’re not, even if you’re just pushing pencils. That is sad. What’s even sadder is that you agreed to take the money.
Was it worth the cost? Not really. It never is. Van Gogh once told his brother, “No painting ever sells for as much as it cost the artist to make it.” I’ve yet to meet in the flesh any artist who could prove him wrong.
Though looking on the bright side, it is nice after years of struggling away in obscurity to have a body of work that you’re actually proud of, one that (a) makes you a good living, (b) exceeds your earlier expectations of what you thought you were capable of achieving as a human being, and perhaps most important, (c) has given a lot of other people a lot of joy and value.