Does Success Get in the Way of Art?
Let's ask some successful artists.
Rebecca Solnit got me thinking. She’s good at that.
Rebecca Solnit is the brilliant author of twenty books on topics as wide-ranging as walking, mansplaining, and George Orwell’s garden. (I wrote a review of that last one for the Washington Post.) She’s not only a great thinker, but a sparkling and witty writer with actual style. Panache, even. She has such a wide-ranging curiosity that there’s no way to predict what she’ll do next. That’s what I love about her.
In a couple of Facebook posts this week (sorry, there doesn’t seem to be a way to link directly to them), she’s been pretty vocal about the toll that success takes on a successful author:
“Every day I get up and more people want more things from me than I can deliver, and the cumulative effect is like being in continual clamor, which makes it hard to do my work or even focus and sometimes it really gets to me…”
and then, a few days later:
“Each of those things will be requests that, no matter how kind or flattering or genuine or even beneficial to your own career and finances as well as someone else's, will pull you from your true purpose. No one will email you persistently or message or call or text to urge you to do the work that is truest to yourself and deepest within your imagination, the work you set out to do…no one will haunt you to stay on your own path. Every request is a request to you to detour from it.”
Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way: Yes, this is a nice problem to have, yes, successful people owe a debt to their audiences and to the community that made their success possible, and yes, one can hire assistants. Etc. etc.
But the fact is, every human being is a finite resource. Creative work demands solitude, an unencumbered mind, many seemingly unproductive hours devoted to failed experiments and rabbit holes leading nowhere, and long stretches of nothingness.
Add to that the demands of being human: a household to run, family to care for, one’s health to manage, friends and community to nurture, perhaps additional income to earn, and there isn’t a lot left to give to the “requests to be on panels, juries, to write things that are not the things you were born to write, to be at festivals, go on book tours…” that Solnit describes.
Every art form has a version of this. Elizabeth Gilbert describes it (and other difficulties of the creative life) as a “shit sandwich” in her wonderful book Big Magic. Are you willing to eat the particular flavor of shit sandwich that accompanies your chosen path? Because there will be one.
The most successful artists get to say no to almost everything that comes at them. I once heard a very famous comedian say that his idea of paradise was just sitting on his terrace, and every time the phone rang, he would pick it up and say “No,” and put it down again.
Bill Murray did just that: he created a secret 800 number that goes directly to voicemail. If someone actually manages to get hold of the number, say, to offer him a part in a film, they can leave a message. He goes weeks without checking it. He almost never calls back.
Neil Gaiman found a way to stem the tide, which he described in this commencement address. (Ironically, a commencement address is exactly the sort of thing famous authors are asked to do instead of writing.) He said,
“There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.”
Even middling authors like me have this problem
I’ve had a small taste of this in my own career. From about the time Wicked Plants was published in 2009, until the pandemic put a stop to it in 2020, I was on a treadmill of constant touring—up to seventy events in a year, enough to earn me very special treatment by airlines—along with so many interviews, freelance articles, etc that the list of such things filled (I am not exaggerating) TEN single-spaced pages for the year 2013 alone. (2013 was the year Drunken Botanist was published. My publicist made this list. I still look at it sometimes with a mixture of awe and terror.)
I was not a great person to be around in those days. I was too busy, I was a little angry, and I missed a lot of birthdays, holidays, and, well, my own life. Sometimes people would say nice things to me like, “Wow, I’m so amazed at everything you do! I want your life!” and I would hand them my phone and say, “Here. Take it. There are forty emails for you to answer.”
I worked seven days a week. I worked through illnesses and major health problems. Once, I was in a hotel at two a.m. in unbearable pain of a female nature, and the only treatment left in my grab-bag of inadequate remedies was a scorching hot bath. The hotel was equipped with one of those ridiculously shallow tubs that aren’t actually meant for bathing. Nonetheless I squeezed my screaming body into it, and as I did, this thought occurred to me: “No one’s going to give you a medal for enduring this.”
That actually made me laugh out loud, in spite of my misery. There are no trophies coming! No one, except my husband, would ever know how much I was suffering right then, and there is no prize for suffering that much! I think I honestly believed that if I endured enough pain, I’d get a big reward someday. Nope!
Fortunately, the pandemic forced me to stop, and that, along with my fiftieth birthday, gave me reasons to shift gears. I live a slower life now, and I do more of what matters. It might cost me something, but I know what it doesn’t cost me: the time I need to do what matters most, during however many good, healthy, happy, productive years or decades I have left on the planet.
Here’s the great irony of this avalanche of offers and requests that accompany success
At first, it feels amazing. Someone wants me to speak on a panel? To write an article? To appear on a podcast? This must be a step up the rung to bigger and better things! This is what successful people do! It will help me get…there!
But where, exactly, is there? Ask someone who has been on the hamster wheel of Doing All the Things in order to Someday Get There, and you will find out that their idea of “There” is a place where they can finally stop doing…you guessed it…All The Things.
Think about the logic behind that. In addition to doing your creative work, you’re going to take on all these other tasks/opportunities/offers that come your way, in the hopes that they will make you so successful that you’ll never have to do them again.
But you know what? Generally, when you do a thing (like speaking engagements), and do it well, with energy and attention and focus, what that gets you is more of that thing. And, because there are only 24 hours in a day, you will simply have to do less of the thing that made people interested in you in the first place.
If the real goal, the one deep in your heart, is to someday be able to just do your art, without being distracted by All the Things, why not…just do your art, and skip All the Things entirely? Sure, you’ll have to find another way to pay the bills. But doing All the Things isn’t a guarantee that your bills will be paid anyway. And maybe your best work, the one that really will be a big hit, can only be made if you stay home for a year or twenty years and really focus on it.
Just a thought.
Let’s celebrate the ways in which creative people protect their time…
…because they often come up with ingenious and witty solutions. Here are a few of my favorites:
On
‘s contact page, he encourages students who write in with questions about him for their school projects to pretend he’s dead. Then, he tells them, go do the research!The artist Jasper Johns had a rubber stamp that simply said “regrets.” He used it to decline invitations.
E.B. White once (and perhaps often) replied to a letter, “I must decline, for secret reasons.”
The poet W.S. Merwin would sometimes bury his mail at the base of palm trees he planted at his home in Hawaii.
Finally, I leave you with this one: My husband (here’s a plug for his wonderful newsletter
) is sometimes in the business of selling letters and other ephemera from writers, and in his shop right now he has this remarkable form letter created by Margaret Atwood:
It includes a form letter in which she explains that “my circumstances are no longer normal, and unless I wish to become a total recluse or invalid I’m afraid I have to refuse.”
She’s also attached what seems like a prose poem that perfectly expresses the thoughts that would run through the head of anyone experiencing such pressure. It includes the line “going to the doctor to see why I have these symptoms-guess what Superwoman it’s stressstressstress”
Is there a solution?
I know that the famous and successful people who grapple with this do not need my advice. But if I were to come up with a solution, it would be this: Pretend it’s 1950. There is no email, or texting. (Maybe there’s a secret email address that only a few people have, and you change it whenever it gets out too much)
There’s a telephone number, which only a few people have and which you can choose not to answer (but no one will ever call, because people have become terrified of telephones), and a post office box.
Most people will not get around to actually writing the letter and putting a stamp on it. But if they do, replying to this mail can become its own sort of art project. Bury some of the mail in your garden, like WS Merwin. Or be like Austin Kleon, and make it into a collage. Ink a “regrets” stamp on some of it, like Jasper Johns. Reply with a form letter, like Margaret Atwood. Accept the odd invitation now and then, if it appeals to you.
Then return to your studio. Go do the thing that only you can do.
Paid subscribers are practicing drawing people
We’re into part two of a three (or four!) part series on how to add people to your sketches. The goal is just to be able to populate a scene with little figures like this—but we’re going deep, and learning the basics of human proportions, before we end up here. We’ll finish up with a live Zoom in a couple of weeks.
Speaking of live Zooms, I’m going to schedule one where we do the kind of chill, two-brushstroke landscapes that I made to illustrate today’s newsletter.
For the price of a couple of cheap pencils, or one exceptionally good pencil, you get these little art lessons delivered to your in-box every Friday. You also get access to the whole archive, invitations to the occasional live Zoom, and the satisfaction of helping to keep this little enterprise afloat. Much appreciated.
The bit at the end
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After I retired from an IT career and wrote my first book, I got invited to speak in Florida—I'm in Indiana—so I did one of the things I hated when I worked, and that was to get on an airplane and fly to another city to do something, well, "work-y." I knew my old boss would laugh if he knew what I was doing after all those years he listened to me gripe about work travel. Anyway, I don't do that anymore. Nipped it in the bud, so to speak...
But what I am really leaving this comment for is to recommend books by Cal Newport, a computer-science professor at Georgetown who has written several books—Deep Work, A World Without Email, and Slow Productivity —which touch on these topics. If you want to email him, he has multiple email addresses and never commits to replying to any of them!
I feel this so deeply! Instant validation (applause, compliments, money, the feeling of having helped someone, requests to do cooler gigs) are so hard to turn down in favor of long-term, maybe-never gratification. They also tend to keep you in a box just when you're looking to change and grow. I am mostly turning down gigs right now, but recently accepted a conference request on the condition that I not be asked to talk about crime and mystery--it's not that I don't love and appreciate it, but my work just isn't that connected to it right now, and I'd rather move toward what I love or stay home. That felt like a big step for me.
Another thing we don't talk about much, but when you say "yes" all the time, there's a risk that you begin to look less like a star and more like "old reliable." As my first burst of success started to fade and I lost other sources of validation, I said yes more and more just to feel like I was "on people's radar." But there's such a thing as being on people's radar for the wrong things. I love helping people but after a while you begin to feel like people see you as a pinch hitter, rather than appreciating you for what <i>you</i> do.
It's so true that "no one will haunt you to stay on your own path." The only solution is to let your path haunt you instead.