The Myth of the Suffering Artist

You do not have to suffer to make Art!

If your art or your artistic process is leaving you feeling bummed out, anxious, depressed, or generally unhappy then you do not have to force yourself to keep working in order to prove yourself a ‘true’ artist. First and foremost art is for pleasure, that means your pleasure too. Forcing yourself to make art when you’re not in the right place will only take something you love and turn it into another chore. Try branching out, take time away from the page or screen to try a new hobby, spend some time outdoors, or with loved ones.

A healthy writer is a productive writer.

Make sure to eat, stay hydrated and stretch; get some sun sometimes!

Don’t put unnecessary pressure on yourself to 'perform’; Inspiration can be fickle and suffer stage fright so the more you try to force yourself to make something amazing the harder it will be to motivate yourself. Plus, if you let your writing become a chore you will avoid it just as passionately as you avoid all of your other chores! Even if you don’t realise that’s what you’re doing.

- A general rule of life is

If something makes you uncomfortable or unhappy, don’t feel you are obligated to do it.

This is true of writing too.

Keep writing, but write happy!

You Need to Read Outside of your Genre…

Yes, you do, however, reading outside of your genre doesn’t automatically mean you should feel ashamed of the love and passion you have for your favourite genre. It’s ok to only read fantasy, to only read romance, to only read horror; reading is first and foremost about enjoyment and if that genre brings you the most pleasure- read it!

Reading outside of your genre offers you additional opportunities and perspectives to the ones you might get from your favoured genre. It is a bonus to what you already read, not a criticism of your tastes or a slap on the wrist and a firm guiding hand towards ‘real literature’. Reading outside of your genre can offer you unique insights into writing description, building character, dealing with time periods, race, economic inequalities, and many other techniques or topics. When I wanted to write characters of a certain race in my fantasy story I went away to read dramas and literary fiction focussing on that race/ethnicity written by authors from that community. Reading those books gave me some insight into the concerns and life experiences of those people that could then in turn inspire how my characters might experience and react to the fantasy world I put them in.

Reading new or challenging fiction should inspire you and will educate you in ways you didn’t expect, but it should NEVER be a punishment for your love and passion for your chosen genre.

Read for pleasure! Read to grow!

But most importantly: Read!

Before you start asking for advice make sure that you are ready to accept it. That means taking your ego and preconceptions about what makes your text/writing great and putting them aside. 

The job of the beta reader is to let the writer know what about their text is not easily comprehensible to the average reader, is not clearly linked to the main narrative themes, is not congruent with the internal logic, or to point out grammar or formatting choices that make the text difficult to read. 

Do not disregard your beta readers feedback because it does not reflect your own understanding of the text or your intentions. The beta readers feedback gives you the outside perspective you need to understand where those intentions are not coming across.

Always be grateful that people have taken the time to read your work, even if you don’t agree with their thoughts or opinions. 

As I have said before: Not all feedback is useful or valid.

Feedback such as:

- I just don’t like it.

- You shouldn’t write X stories because they’re bad

- X genre is bad

- You shouldn’t have X type of person in your story because it disagrees with my ethical/moral/religious/cultural beliefs 

- You are bad at writing and you should just give up

- No one will want to read your work

All of this advice is useless, it is not critique it is criticism, ignorance, or flat out bullying.

However, feedback such as

- I didn’t understand why x character did that? It seemed out of character

- It didn’t make sense when x thing happened. Where did it suggest this was possible?

- Where was this happening? 

- Who was talking in this scene? I couldn’t tell

These are only a few examples, but this type of critique will give you insight into where your text is failing.

Just as taking feedback requires putting aside your ego and preconceptions so does giving feedback. If you know you don’t like a specific genre do not try to beta read that genre because you will always carry an implicit bias which will shade your opinions of the text. This means even when you have good intentions say “No” because ultimately you will help your friend or colleague better if you give them no feedback rather than discouraging feedback. Instead just encourage them and give them emotional support.

Don’t take to heart criticism or hurtful comments if you should be unlucky enough to receive them, you will receive a lot of rejection if you choose writing as a career. Ultimately, your text will find its audience it might just be that that one person wasn’t a part of it. Good luck!

You’ve probably seen the standard formatting, grammar rules, spelling rules and thought at least once ‘They’re holding me back! I’m an Artist!”

Well, consider why the rules are the rules. These rulesshould be broken but, before they are, you should know why they exist and why you are breaking them.

Standard formatting, grammar, and spelling are all designed to help make text accessible. When you choose to break the rules you are doing so at the risk of lessening the accessibility of your text to the reader. This is extra important when you consider that your readership could include people with dyslexia, sight-loss or other health conditions that cause them to struggle with reading. 

Moving away from the standard formatting can also make your text less appealing to the market as readers ultimately get the final say on what they purchase or otherwise support.

A famous example of an author who broke away from the standard formatting and grammar rules is Cormac McCarthy. You have probably heard of No Country For Old Men. McCarthy is a successful and lauded author but when he first began writing he caused a great deal of disagreement over his stylistic choices.

Take a look at this abstract of McCarthy’s book

Do you find it easy to read? Much of his audience didn’t. McCarthy believed that much of the punctuation we use when writing was unnecessary and so he cut it out. Do you agree with him or disagree now that you have read a sample of his work?

This is not me saying that you cannot be successful if you break the rules, just that you need to ask yourself these questions:

- Is my text still accessible?

- Why am I breaking the rules?

- What does my text gain from this rule-breaking?

If you do not have convincing argument as to why you are moving away from the standard formatting perhaps consider writing your fiction within the rules. You can always break them later or reformat your text once you understand how rule-breaking could help it. 

(Of course, this only applies to texts you are writing for a wider audience, not texts you are writing to experiment with form or grow your skills. Experimentation is always good.) 

Got brain fog? Don’t worry. Sometimes we get writers burnout, it’s a normal part of the intense and brain-strain heavy nature of writing. Keeping a regular schedule for your creativity is important for maintaining progress but that doesn’t mean you should force it if it is not right for you. 

Take some time out of writing to explore your ideas and your creativity in other fashions. Maybe draw some art of your characters, make a sculpture, crochet, write a theme song, animate, or plan a videogame set in your ‘world’. 

“But I’m not good at drawing”

You don’t have to be!

No one is judging your relaxation art. This is just a time for you to stretch your brain and rest it from all of that hard work whilst keeping it flexible and creative!

It’s ok to create art for fun and not for others consumption, and it’s important to practice that self-love of making art that isn’t ‘perfect’.

Explore your ideas from a new angle and give your hardworking brain a break!

A big question I often see is ‘How much world-building should I do for my story?’ The simple but annoying answer is: However much your story needs. It sounds vague but it’s really about proportion. 

- If your story is a small character focussed narrative then you won’t need a massive, overbearing world. Streamlining your info-dumps down into only what is necessary is important for any story, but even more important in a very precise and narrow focussed story. Your reader should always be left with questions in fiction so don’t be afraid if people come out of your story wanting more of your world, that’s a good thing and a compliment to your writing.

- Epic quest, or big journey stories need more world-building because they require the audience to be able to accurately conceptualise of the world the characters are travelling through and what affects their actions will have on it at a grander scale. This applies to stories like LOTR and GoT where the stakes are all very high and the locations widespread. If someone is willing to invest their time into your 6 page description of trees and bushes then they can probably handle an extensive world, but these types of readers are of specific tastes and for wider audiences large quantities of explanation and description can be off-putting. It didn’t stop Tolkien.

A general rule of thumb for any fiction is to look at the proportions in your fiction: How many words do you put into description, how many into info dumps, how many into character scenes. If info dumps or description vastly outweigh character you might need to look at cutting. It can be hard cutting out info dumps, but if you are clever you will be able to find places to slot in the vital information in a more natural and character serving way. Whatever you like and don’t want to cut you can always put into an appendices! (If it’s good enough for LotR and Dune, why not you?!)

If you’re like me and you’re addicted to writing long and wordy descriptions of landscapes… well go ahead, but be aware you are setting a trap out for yourself. Many people won’t like it, but if they don’t well… refer to my previous post about not everyone liking your work. As long as it’s out there and you’re doing your part to advertise and push your work there will be people who share your tastes and enjoy what you create. 

(I’ll make a follow-up post with tips on how to world-build to compliment this one rather than overburdening a single post. See ya later!)

It’s easy to think of yourself as an ‘Artist’, to look at contempt with people who talk about money, and advertising, and publishing laws when we discuss fiction, but by doing that you cut yourself off from the ability to really get your work seen.

There is no shame in writing for money, and it doesn’t make you any less of an ‘Artist’ to engage with the business side of publishing. Even if you don’t care how much money you make from your books you still want people to read them right? And for people to do that they have to actually know about your book: that requires advertising knowledge, a website, and internet algorithms, or traditional publishing. Yes: business skills.

It’s easy to think that people who meet you will instantly sense your ‘Artistic genius’, and that publishers will read the first page of your novel and realise you’re a prodigy but…let’s be honest… you’re not. And neither am I. In fact, the likelihood of anyone reading this blog being the world’s-greatest-writer-who-has-ever-lived is extremely low. That’s not an insult, just the truth, and learning to recognise yourself as someone who is pursuing a career (no more special or predestined than any other) and who is in a constant process of growth, will protect you from becoming buried by your own ego.

Don’t block yourself off from success! Don’t undermine your own work by shunning the business side of writing! You don’t have to treat the idea of being paid a wage with contempt in order to be an artist!

Truth is not a universal concept.

You will experience a lot of different truths over the course of your life, and you will express them through your fiction. Perhaps, as you grow older you will look back and find that something that felt truthful to you when you were young now rings hollow. That is a natural part of human growth, and not a sign that what you wrote at the time was ‘untruthful’. You wrote your truth as you experienced it at that point in your life and it is still valid. Do not seek to express universal truths because universal truths are an illusion, they change culture to culture. Express your truth as you experience it at the time you are in in your life. Someone, somewhere at some point in their life will find in it a kindred soul.