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How do you hold onto the fire when business and commerciality takes over the creative field you love?
Making the decision to move into a professional creative career warrants careful thought. It may seem a logical choice because of your love for the field, but the increased pressure, not to mention the commercial and business aspects, often make the daily work of the art less exciting and interesting than it was before.
Writers used to write because they loved writing and telling stories, but now it is less about the story than about structure and style in creating it, and thinking of marketing and promotion ideas, and keeping an eye on sales. I don’t know many writers who are happy as salesmen.
Writers used to read for pleasure, to relax and unwind and look for ideas. Now you find yourself picking the work apart – a typo here, a point of view jump there, a clichéd sentence, an inconsistency.
Art becomes less about expressing your ideas on canvas and more about creating saleable commercial artwork, satisfying the desires of a commissioning buyer, getting a gallery booking.
Musicians can no longer relax completely by listening to music – they listen to how individual notes build the structure of a piece.
You can accept that your profession is no longer purely yours, in a way it belongs to your audience and your market if you’re ever going to sell your work. But with so many options available to you, it is possible to find a second outlet for your creative expression.
Many creative people have multiple talents, but the beauty of finding a creative outlet purely for yourself is that you don’t have to be good at it. The sole purpose is to enjoy yourself and express yourself purely, in a way that you may no longer be able to afford to in your professional work. It doesn’t have to be vastly different from what you do now, although that can help to relax you far more if you can take your mind completely off what it is you do for a living.
Novelists can delve into short stories if they have a burning need to explore a story that doesn’t seem commercially viable.
Artists could simply change media – cartooning is a great idea for otherwise serious artists because of its ability to make you laugh at your creations.
Musicians could try learning a different instrument, or working in a different genre of music. Jazz is an excellent genre for self-expression, in addition to being great music to listen to because the listener has no control over, and no preconceived expectation for, the notes that are played.
Acting and dance are great creative outlets, too, because you can allow yourself to be silly, and get your body moving. If you spend all day working alone, or working with serious, driven, business-like people, mixing with a group of like-minded amateur creatives can give you a real boost.
copyright © Elsa Neal 2006 (Please contact the
for permission to reprint this article.)
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