Back To the Drawing Board

For many years, I’ve convinced myself that writing is the easiest art form to undertake but the hardest to get satisfaction out of. I say this as someone who has made a living from the written word, off and on, for roughly four decades. My professional experience as a writer probably skews my perspective. When you do something for a living, or just do it a lot, the magic eventually gets sucked out of it — at least for me. It becomes a habit, then a grind, then a nagging roommate. It’s part of your daily world, like dirty clothes. Do it enough and the luster fades.

But that’s not the only reason I feel this way. The bigger reason is that just about anyone can write – and many do it with some level of competence. Most people write every day, whether it’s for work, to communicate with others, or just little notes to themselves. It’s pretty damn easy, putting fingers to keyboard, or pen to paper.

Compare that with other creative pursuits, which seem impossibly hard to me. Most people don’t play the guitar or piano every day. Most don’t compose music every day. Or paint. Or sculpt. Or act in a stage or film production. Or design a building, or make pottery, or carve wooden trinkets, or sing (okay, we all sing….).

Everybody writes. In fact, so many people write that a whole galaxy of people think they can do it for money.

Do you know how many real or aspiring writers there are in the world? I don’t either. But I do know this: Millions of books are published every year, and many millions more are written but not published. Millions of short stories are written every year, and poems, and plays, essays, memoirs, etc.

According to this website, in 2021 there were about 2.3 million new self-published books in the United States alone. The U.S. has about 4% of the world’s population. So if you extrapolate the numbers, you could say that around 52 million new self-published books came out globally the same year. I doubt that’s correct, but you get the picture.

My point is: Lots of people think they can be writers. Not lots of people think they can be saxophone players, or sculptors, or architects, or stage actors.

You hear plenty of folks say, “I should write a book about that.” You don’t hear many say, “I should paint a series of pictures about that,” or “I should design a line of clothing about that.”

So: Writing is easy. Whether you have any formal training or not, you can sit down right now and write a story that is reasonably coherent and maybe even pretty close to grammatically correct. We all tell stories, so it’s not that big a leap to write a story.

But if you try to play the flute or paint a landscape with no formal training, what you’ll end up with is either noise or the visual equivalent of noise.

So: Writing is easy.

But:

It’s not always easy to get satisfaction out of writing – at least once you reach (or aspire to) a certain artistic level.

Think about it. When you have finished writing something, what do you have, really? You have a bunch of words and sentences and paragraphs and stanzas. Maybe they’re brilliant, or maybe they’re rubbish. Either way, it’s just words and sentences and paragraphs and stanzas.

Compare that to other creative pursuits. When you finish building a table, you have a piece of furniture – something with a practical value. When you finish a painting, you can hang it on the wall. When you are playing music, you are creating sounds that other ears might hear and enjoy – and even if there aren’t, your ears are hearing it. There’s something tangible. If you are rehearsing a part for a play or movie, you at least know that at some point, somebody will see your work. Maybe it’s just some grim person in an audition room, but at least Somebody Will See It.

Not so with writing. What you write might never reach anyone else’s eyes. It might not survive beyond your desk.

Should that be a determining factor of whether writing is a worthwhile pursuit? No – of course not. You should write for the sheer enjoyment of it, to tell your story, express your thoughts, get your emotions out, whether anyone reads it or not. Some writers write simply because they love it – and more power to ‘em.

Even so: I wonder how most writers feel. I wonder whether they would bother writing fiction or poems or screenplays or memoirs if they didn’t expect some kind of payoff at the end of the rainbow.

*****

As noted before on this blog, a couple years ago I took up drawing simply because I was kind of burnt out on writing fiction and wanted another creative pursuit. I wasn’t very good at drawing. But I got a lot of satisfaction out of it.

The process of drawing could be frustrating and mentally taxing because I could never master the simplest techniques. Drawing a straight line or a decent circle was like scaling Mount Everest. But I still got absorbed in it, and felt great once I had a finished drawing. I could look at it and feel some sense of accomplishment.

I rarely feel that after writing something. I’m rarely satisfied. I suffer over the silliest stuff, and there’s no mystery as to why: It’s because I think I’m a good writer. No, check that: I think I’m a very good writer. Whether I am or not is immaterial – I think I am. So what I write has to meet certain standards. I can’t just let it be what it is. It has to hit a set of expectations or I will curse it and then trash it and then start all over again.

I don’t feel this way about drawing. Oh, I get frustrated when I can’t get the eyes or trees or sky just right. But because I don’t think I’m very good at drawing, I give myself a break. I let the imperfections go. I don’t beat myself up. I focus on the process, and that becomes its own reward. I’m just happy to have completed a drawing.

*****

Well, I took up drawing again a couple of weeks ago after a two-year hiatus. I gave up drawing after we moved back to the States from London because there were a thousand and one other things that needed to be done.

I’m not exactly sure why I returned to drawing. Part of it has to do with the need to fill a creative hole that writing doesn’t fill anymore. I’m so busy writing web content for a living that I don’t have much time to write fiction anymore. Even if I did have time, my heart’s not really into fiction these days. Maybe that will change, I don’t know.

The only non-paid writing I do these days is this blog. And frankly, this blog has become a bit of a problem for me. I can no longer blog about being an expat, since I’m no longer an expat. I can no longer blog about my fiction work, because I’m not writing much fiction.

What I have been blogging about a lot lately is the U.S. political arena, which has become a major shitstorm starring the sorriest lot of psychopaths and frauds the United States has ever had the idiocy to put into positions of power. I am angered every day by the fact that these folks are in control. And I’m sick of being angered by it. Blogging about it only angers me more, like right now, so….

I needed another creative outlet. So I returned to drawing. It’s the kind of creative outlet that doesn’t anger me, but relaxes me, enriches me. I know I’m not very good at it – and I don’t care. I just enjoy it. And I like having something tangible to look at when I’m done. I like getting absorbed in it. I like not worrying whether it meets a certain set of standards.

I’m starting out slow, just drawing simple cartoon characters that others dreamed up and got rich and famous off of.

I am sharing one of my latest drawings here, on this blog. It’s what you would call “derivative” and “amateurish.” It’s not that good. I don’t care. It fills a creative hole – and a political one. And here’s the funny thing: I felt no anger when drawing it. None. Zero. I just had fun with it. I aimed for something that would make a political point without beating it into the ground. I could never do that with writing.

I’ll continue to draw. I’ve spent money buying new pencils, a new sketch book, a new portfolio to house everything in. I don’t care if anyone sees my work. I’ll never master it. But I’ll also never suffer over it.

And for that, I am beyond grateful.