#but i don’t know how to fix it
if anyone has any advice on how to train my brain into creating for the sake of creation and not for what kind of money i can make off of it please send it my way
reblogs encouraged
Basic question: do you get joy out of creating when you receive money for it, or in moments across the process?
And: when was the last time you created something for the sole reason of having fun making it and looking at the finished product?
A lot in capitalism implies a creation is only as worthwhile as the money it can make, but the thing is, one cannot truly accurately predict what makes or breaks a creation as a “sellable” product
As example, I have never watched Rick and Morty, but I watched a video on it where the youtuber went on a lot of tangents about the need to be bad at creating to get good at it, and then I learned that apparently the series started out from a joke where the teenager form Back to the Future has to lick the balls of the scientist for problems to be solved
Does that sound marketable and profitable for you? But when you look at the amount of people obsessed with the show, does your judgment hold any relevance to how it did make money?
Have you ever heard of the giant incest baby episodes in Rick and Morty?
Profitable art does not equal good or sensible art, and even with a lot more going on in the show that has a kind of complex narratives to it, things like where it started and the incest baby don’t become any more palatable in concept because of so
To try to create keeping solely profit in mind is an exercise in futile efforts prone to making you dead inside because your ideas don’t matter, what you want doesn’t matter - everything you think of needs to be broken and reshaped into sellable, marketable, and that sooner means writing another fifty shades of grey for all the reasons it was terrible, than actually going through with things you personally value and enjoy
And then, even then, there’s no guarantee you’ll gain profit, and coming to such an end after everything you did to be marketable and sellable, was it worth it obsessing so much with making money to the point what once was an action of creation you loved has now become a souless and dreadful task of trying to fit in capitalist priorities?
Specially because it doesn’t matter what you do when creating, even if there is an audience out there precisely for what you’re making, that doesn’t mean they’ll want to have anything to do with what you made
Profit is an ungrateful lottery of an achievement when it comes to art, and obsessing with it as the priority of your creations is a whole other level of self sabotage where winning can be as miserable as failing
You have no control over people and industry in order to guarantee that your marketable creation will sell, how the hell are you going to rely on that as a seeming objective evaluation of what is worth making or not?
What will you even get to create when that’s the standard?
this is all excellent advice and i thank you for taking the time to give it. i think, though, that u may have not been clear enough in my original post.
i love creating. i draw bad pictures and badly sing silly songs i helped my niece and nephew make up. i cook and bake, usually with good results.
i love writing fanfiction. in the past six-ish months, i’ve written almost 70k words of it. when i’m writing fanfiction the words just flow out of me and i feel really good about this thing that i am creating
when i try to write my original stories, i hit a wall. i am not being paid for them in the slightest, but my brain just kind of goes: “well we could get paid for this so it has to be perfect“ so it’s less the actual act of being paid and more of the “this thing needs to be perfect because maybe it will bring money” vs my fanfiction or bad drawings or silly songs that are just for me
