… is doing the writing.

It’s easy to sit and think, and it’s actually pleasurable (or indulgent) to outright daydream (and I have no argument against some self-indulgence). Putting those thoughts into formalized language, via sitting still and typing it up (or writing it, for you traditional media lovers), is the part that requires self-discipline and physical effort.

But then, this is the hard part about all creative work. It’s the part of the work that is the work. It’s great to sit back and look at something I’ve created. Listening to music I’ve made, or re-reading a piece of fiction (or non-fiction) I’ve written, can be a joy. Getting to that point, however, is a job. I hear reports of creative people who can’t not work. They’re compelled to do the work, and, when they’re done with it, they set it aside and do more (because they must). I am not that kind of person.

I watched a series of interviews with TV writers conducted by Charlie Brooker. One of his guests paraphrased something that the internet attributes to Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing; I love having written.” Only this writer said “I love having written, but I fucking hate writing.” I’m with him, especially when creating music. I find the work extremely irritating, between the software flaws and the general sense of manipulating content via clumsy polls taped loosely to my hands (I am not an instrumentalist). With no promise of reward, the effort seems unworthy. Occasionally I get past the lack of reward, and that might be down to my limited compulsion to create. Otherwise, I’m faced with this inertial blockade: What’s the reward? For me, the reward has to be external.

Oh, I know, that’s a social faux pas. I should need nothing from anyone! All satisfaction for the work should be internal and inherent and any creative person of any worth should blah blah this and blah blah that… I’m going to deviate from my point a bit to address this: There’s a myth that people should only ever do work that they love (that belief is for privileged people, or those who’ve not yet learned that is a privileged life). More relevantly, there’s also a myth that creative people should love what they do, do it for enjoyment, and not expect compensation for the work (even as others derive entertainment from consuming said work). Those of you subscribing to these ideologies might want to talk to a professional writer some time (professional, as in: their life is supported by writing).

“Personal satisfaction” is often strongly influenced by what nurturing you’ve received over your lifetime (positive or negative). The culture in the USA tells people that creative work is both “special” and “unimportant”. It’s “special” in that only “special people” can be artists/musicians, etc. “Unimportant” in that it is impractical and without value, unless it can be sold for a sum of money. We get these beliefs inserted into our thinking directly and indirectly, more or less, depending on our family and peers. Some of us are nurtured, but most of us are driven toward thinking we are not “gifted” or “not meant to live the life of an artist”. The “secret” fact is that arts are learned skills like anything else. You might have a differing sense from others on what feels “easy” or feels “very difficult” to you, but no one is “born an artist” and no one is “born unable to be an artist” (with acknowledgement to physiological disabilities).

That deviation aside… Writing, as in words on a page, feels so much easier for me to do than music or drawing (look how much text there is here; it felt easy enough). With writing non-fiction like this blog entry, I can get past inertia with much greater ease. I have an impulse, no one is available to speak my thoughts to, so I write it out. The “reward” is to get my thoughts out of my head, see them externally, maybe refine them and discover more in them than I would have otherwise (editing is a great self-reflective time… or a time to seal up your echo-chamber). Hopefully, someone else will read it (even better: respond to it).

It’s much harder and far greater a task to create a believable fictional world and populate it with realistic people and events, than it is to create a stream of consciousness online rant, or even a four minute piece of music (especially considering today’s ease of access to music-creation tools). Consider writing fiction and along comes the motivation fight: the expected effort vs the expected reward. The expected effort is high and the expected reward is nothing at all. I don’t “get the idea out of my head”. I merely get deeper into it. It becomes a place to exist in, and, as with the rest of my life, I do not enjoy existing in a place all by myself.

When I create a piece of music, I get no financial reward for the work. I can play it for someone, asking usually less than five minutes of their time. I can listen to the music myself and enjoy the results while doing other things (like driving to and fro). I could share a musical album of work with someone who could consume that content casually or with focus, as they please. If I create a piece of writing, however, that constitutes a greater time investment for anyone to consume it. It cannot be done passively, in the background. Fewer people want to read pages of writing than will listen to a five-minute piece of music (especially if it has pop-sensibilities; they might be able to sing along to it after a few listens). Music is inherently easier to consume (unless you’re working in a less accessible style, and plenty of musical artists will attest to difficult audiences). Therefore, I feel that an external reward of having someone consume what I create (and react to it) is even harder to pursue with writing fiction.

Or is it? You might suggest that I could just post stories to this blog and let the Internet’s population read (or not read) it freely. Is that compensation for the work? It is still a very solitary existence, so I would want feedback… but do I need to point out the general quality of Internet comments? Even if I received constructive feedback (or just acknowledgement that I’ve entertained someone or touched them), it is still quite a lot of time and effort invested that has not gone to serving my practical living needs (money for food, shelter, transport, insurance, funding things that make life worth living, etc).

Traditional media is still limping along, but it appears to be harder to get published today than it was prior to the Internet “leveling the playing field” (i.e.: tricking people into giving away their labors for free, forcing formalized publishers to struggle to sell paid-for content). I see no evidence of publishers clamoring for fiction to publish. Even if they are, writers make a paltry sum and any movements to better compensate people in a creative field tend to be mocked by “the working class”. Laborers tend to sneer at writer’s strikes. “Those people even get paid for that? Why should they get paid more than me? Why should they get paid at all for doing something they think is fun??”

I am by no means sneering back at laborers. I started my working life laboring at age 15. Unfortunately, humans being humans, labor unions have a tendency to speak out with a narrow view on what constitutes work. I personally experienced what happens when a union focused on department of transportation workers is left to represent a skilled laborer in an educational institution (quick summary: they left me with a very negative impression of unions). Do writing for a living and you’ll possibly consider that a labor job. Work is work. I don’t think work stops being work until you’re a multi-millionaire celebrity CEO of a global corporation who only needs to tell assistants what work to do in your name… (yeah, I know the excuse: the decisions are extremely risky/costly so they deserve the high pay, blah blah blah, not getting into that whole thing here, libertarians)

For everyone but the most lucky and critical successes in writing, the pay is easily summed up with the term “beer money”. I’ve read about published authors refusing to share their numbers; less due to propriety and more due to being embarrassed over the tiny amount of financial reward they received for the work. I presume these are the kinds of people who “can’t not write”, so they continue to do it regardless (and keep a day job), or these are the people who only recently “broke in” to the writing market and still maintain hope of attaining greater success…(?)

Though people living in poverty would surely take “beer money” if it were thrown at their heads (speaking of myself here, and I’m not a beer fan), I don’t think the effort required to earn that money with writing is mentally/emotionally cost-efficient. It’s actual work. It takes actual time. Time that could be spent on other activities. If you have lots of time, due to not being able to work a “traditional competitive employment” job, then… is that time and effort still not worth something? If you’re retired, maybe you’re ready to do as little as possible. Maybe you’re a workaholic and cannot comprehend doing nothing for a few hours, let alone a week. What if you were ejected from the job market by abusive employers and left disabled, to slowly spiral downward in the quicksand that is the crippled American social support system? Well, damn, not only do you feel as though there’s no reward for writing, you have actual practical life experience that suggests there’s no reward for labor either (both skilled and unskilled).

So, what’s the point in pursuing the work if you can find no reward for it? Is it “impulse to create”, or nothing then?

We don’t live in a social vacuum, therefore it confounds me when people suggest that I ought behave as if we all were islands unto ourselves. I strongly feel the social influences that result in me writing this blog entry when I could instead be starting the multi-volume story idea I have been considering for about a year. I addressed the social aspects in my deviation above, attempting to dispel those myths about creative work, but there’s more to it than that. Writing need not be an entirely solo activity.

I have repeatedly asked a companion to engage in writing with me. She is a brilliant analyst of fiction and people. She loves stories and can dive deeply into their worlds with very little effort, and we engage in hours of conversation about other people’s fictional worlds. So “help me write something!”, I say. A partnership has not happened yet. Talk to her about work, effort, self-discipline, and procrastination. These are all problems with the work she does for her actual job, let alone adding in all the work of a writer on the side. Maybe it would be ultimately more interesting for her, but would it financially compensate her for the time spent?

I have actively engaged in limited writing partnership with another friend. This is the one I sometimes refer to as “my writer friend” (I try to encourage her to aim for publication, but she has thus far simply done the work because she is compelled to). I’ve written suggested scenes for her book, as well as spent hours discussing the content of her world with her. As a non-solo activity, it was emotionally rewarding to produce content for her, even when there’s a good chance my text wont make it into her book. It wasn’t any less effort. It was still work and it felt like work (however, it is a task shared, in a writing partnership).

But there’s another aspect to the sense of value to the work done for her (the hint is in those last two words: “for her“). It was more satisfying than doing my own solo writing because it was work done for someone else. This is the mental programming I have been conditioned into by my family and society: “work done for others is inherently more worthwhile than work done for myself“. What would happen if I had an actual writing partnership?

I actually did co-write a book once, with a former friend, but the content constitutes fan fiction (a now much more well-known fictional universe than it was prior to 2005 when we wrote it). The completed work was lost to computers (despite my obsessiveness with data storage). I have most, but not all, of it. It’s likely not worth re-creating an end and offering it up to the owners of the copyright (especially with the way the friendship between myself and my writing partner dissolved). However, it was great practice (so I tell anyone writing fan fiction not to disregard the work as “meaningless” or “worthless”). That experience was both a rewarding and disheartening one. On one hand: we wrote a book (or a novella at least)! On the other hand: it seemed to make him even less motivated (sad sigh). It was the first and last thing we did together as a team. If he felt our styles were too incompatible, he did not respect me enough to be sincere about why nothing more came of it. Personally, I felt our differences were entirely complimentary and made us an ideal team.

So now I’m talking about experiences with positive internal rewards. It might sound like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m posing a question: In these partnerships, is this limited reward of experiencing a shared creation process enough to justify the work, or do we (do I) still need to seek financial compensation? My social conditioning says “yes, absolutely. Work should be what you do to live.” I successfully fought against the wrongheaded (and common in the USA) ideology of “living to work”, but I certainly have had enough “work to live” conditioning to make me feel guilty about wasted time and assistance from others.

Here comes the bottom line: The culture that shaped my existence tells me that I am wasting my time if I am not doing something that can reward me with financial income. Because of the mental/emotional expense cost-benefit ratio, it therefore feels “better” to waste time doing that which is easy (consuming someone else’s content), rather than spending that time doing something difficult (writing one or more novels for the ideas banging around in my head), which might ultimately be an utter waste of time due to it generating zero financial reward. The aversion to wasted time is stronger when the activity is one that takes greater effort, and I am left more easily justifying wasting time on consumption than on creation.

Now, react!

(It’s somewhat amusing that I post this on Valentine’s Day. “Do what you love” and all that…)