Creative writing * is hard. Doing it for a living is even harder and, to make it worse, romanticised into something it isn't.
At the end of Romancing the Stone, Kathleen Turner types the last page of her novel straight onto a typewriter (with no editing!), crying her eyes out at the beauty of it, before going outside to climb onboard an enormous yacht to kiss Michael Douglas. This is unrealistic.
Many people strive to write creatively for a living, but proportionally hardly anyone manages it. So why do people bother? I often imagine an idealised writers life - a study with a big desk, views over a garden, books on high shelves all around me, peace and quiet, etc. It's never going to happen. I have realised I only do this when I am not writing.The fundamental activity of creating anything is improvisation. Improvising means starting, and
starting is very hard.
Improvising/starting is hard because it is painful to make something from inside ourselves, and for it to be not very good. And 99% of it will be average or awful, at least in the beginning, because that's natural selection in action, creativity in it's purest form. The skill is knowing a good idea when it comes and not throwing it away with the rest. Ruthlessness is a key artistic quality.
But another key quality is compassion. You need to allow yourself to improvise the average and the awful to get at the diamonds that come along every now and then.
Of course, if expressing yourself is your focus, there are other ways - sculpting, dancing, or singing. It's better to express yourself in, say, painting, or acting/role play, than to feel stuck because you haven't got the time/energy/ability to write something 'worthwhile' (that deadly, awful word). Better to try a new medium, realise how much you suck, and come back to writing later, rejuvenated.
Improvising isn't about 'worthwhile', it's about letting yourself be human in all your messiness, and making tiny decisions on the fly. Becoming skilled at expressing how you feel requires learning to improvise, I think, and trusting your intuition. Making it beautiful comes afterwards. And 'worthwhile' is for others to judge, not us. As artists we serve ourselves first.
So, back to making a living. I can make a living as a craftsperson, an engineer, making beautiful things for other people. I can put my energy and attention into a piece of software, a wooden table, a piece of advertising copy, but always it is for someone else's purpose.
I could design a chair that is elegant, simple, comfortable, functional and beautiful, but that wouldn't serve my inner need to (for example!) put spikes on the seat and arms. In art there is an extra layer of meaning beyond the functional, and I think that meaning comes from inside the artist, expresses something the artist feels very strongly.
The artists work involves improvising, reflecting on it, improvising again with the new insights in mind, reflecting on it, and repeating until the energy is gone. That is when a piece is finished.
The only people who get paid for working on themselves are artists and psychotherapists (I'll explore that in another post). So if you are an artist/writer and you can't get paid for your work, what is the best way of making a living?
* For clarity, my definition of creative writing here is poetry, fiction, life writing, or drama.
Image by Diana Blackwell, via Flickr, under the Creative Commons license.