Publish over Pleasure
You’re going to hate what I’m about to say in this article. I hate it too.
Your art and writing should not be fun, your art and writing should be PUBLISHED and available to the world.
I’ll assume you’re a beginner like me. For some reason, the universe has given me a desire to create that I can’t turn off. I’ve certainly ignored it for many years. The creative urge has been squashed down while I pursued various money-making careers.
Making art takes time, building a career takes time, and having a family takes time. The cruel truth is that there is only so much time in a day. So the urge to create art gets smothered under a pillow while I focus on feeding my family. But wouldn’t you know, that damn thing just won’t die. As I’m walking through my peaceful career-and-family-life-wonderland, its zombie hand breaks through the dirt and tugs at my pant leg.
It screeches: “You are bored and unfulfilled with your day job. You need me. You. Must. Create. Something.” And then I feel its yellowed teeth sink into the fleshy part of my calf and I scream out, “OK, jeez, chill!!”
Creative Masturbation
My favorite thing in the world is to sit down with my notebook and write and doodle whatever I want. I follow the lead of my brain. I sip my coffee and have a nice diary-doodle wank session. It feels great, but it doesn’t make my art and writing better. Most of the time I end up rehashing ground I’ve covered 1,000 times already and doodling the same incorrectly proportioned characters I’ve been drawing for 15 years. I lose a lot of time that I could spend focused on something that would move me forward better.
Editor’s note: As I’m writing this it feels against every part of my existence to say that I should neglect my journal and that creative pleasure is perverse, but life requires we make choices with how we spend our time, so I stand by it. I will never stop spending time in my notebooks because there is an innate value in letting one’s brain explore and play. But it is not direct progress toward a goal in itself. Something more must come after. In a world of limited time, every choice counts. I wish it didn’t. But I also wish I didn’t need to work for a living.
Yet there’s still not enough time
You want to create but you don’t have enough time. You want to “be an artist” (wtf does that even mean?) but how does that happen when you don’t have time to perfect your craft?
The only way is that you choose to make time for the urge. Work on the real thing, not the fun but distracting thing. You force yourself to eliminate the word perfect from your vocabulary. You eliminate the word good. You learn to tell yourself that when it comes to making stuff:
Anything is better than nothing
Anything is better than something unfinished
Then you go and make something real, with intention, and YOU MAKE IT ALL THE WAY, darnit!
Work to publish vs. work for pleasure
If you want to grow as an artist you must create and create and create some more. To improve your craft you must work intentionally. If you want your drawings to be more refined you must draw from life. If you want your writing to improve, you must write with the intention of being read. The more often you create towards a finished product, and the more focused you can be, the faster you will become better. And then by the power of the Internet, put that work out into the world for the rest of us to enjoy…please.
Full disclosure: These ideas were triggered (and/or partially stolen) from watching the video below. In it, Jack Conte, the founder of Patreon, talks about creative productivity. Take a watch for yourself if you please.