The title is a little dramatic, “failure” is a strong word. But I am returning to something I had given up on. This time it feels different, it feels right. It feels less dark and less tied to my self worth. I’m talking about my writing, I used to write, like a lot. I spent my twenties writing and editing and trying to become an author, trying to make a living off my words. I was delusional.
Of course making it as an author is like winning the lottery, it was a dream no different than had I been in a band that was going to make it big one day. It was just some youthful delusion. I thought that all I had to do was write a book and then bam!, I would have people reading it and banging down my door looking for more. It was such a naive view, I have always been a late bloomer. It took years for me to realize that the world of words does not work like that.
Simply writing a novel is not good enough. I don’t even know if my writing is good, I think it’s pretty shit to be totally honest. Need’s refining and work. And that’s what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to refine my craft. I am a hobby novelist. I write for fun, I don’t want all the work and headache of endless rewrites and edits.
Sure I will edit and proof my stuff before I publish but I think that I am just going to write for the sake of writing and self publish for fun and because it’s a nice way to keep track of my stories. I don’t need an audience, I don’t need to turn it into work. I want to keep it fun. I have a career that I don’t hate, a way to make money, I don’t need to make it as an author. I just want to create. I have fun in the creation, fuck all the rest. So I’m not a professional writer, I’m a hobby writer and that’s fine.
That is what sucked the joy out of all my creative endeavors. I needed to perfect them, take them seriously, treat them like a job. I needed to turn them all into a revenue stream. My career goal of joining the militarily fizzled due to my mental health (or lack of mental health) and then I fell back on writing as my next option.
But art is not a career for most, it is a thing we do, it is a way to express. My writing had never been for finding a large audience or for making money, it had been a way to explore stories and worlds I built in my head. A way to turn imagination into something tangible. My need for it to be successful sapped all the joy from it. Like a vampire it drained the happiness and fulfillment I got from writing.
It turned something I loved into a job. And it took me stepping away for years to finally see that. To finally accept that I can write for the sake of writing. For the happiness it brings me, for the fact that it makes me feel accomplished. If my books are bad it simply does not matter. They are a joy to craft and at the end if they are ugly and terrible that’s fine. I am not looking to make this my job, not any more.
The same with film making. Another thing I dove into, thinking I could become some kind of indie underground YouTube filmmaker. It was a way to blend my love of story telling with my love of the more technical side of things as editing and filming are as much a science as they are an art. At least to me. It was fulfilling, it gave me purpose, I could see my creations and see how to improve them and make them better. It was hard and took a lot of work but I enjoyed it.
I never found an audience though. My films were too weird, too personal, too experimental. They were hobby pieces that I should have never expected to gain any kind of traction. But once again I wanted to make it my path to a happy life. Where I could create for a living. So, once again, I sucked the joy out of it all with this need to make it a revenue stream. I tried to make things more main stream, and it became harder and harder to create as the more you refine in film the more time it takes to shoot, edit and compose the whole thing.
I did the same thing I did with writing. I turned it into a job. And that ruined it for me. In my desire to escape the 9-5 I was destroying all that I enjoyed. Having to make every activity generate it’s own revenue stream. It was not healthy and it took so much from me.
I’m back now. I think I have finally matured enough, grown enough, to know that my creative side is the side I love and nurture, not the side I need to torture and milk in a hapless attempt to make money. My creative side is my escape, my way to spend time on something and feel like it was not wasted time. I like to produce, to make things, to see my visions come to life. And that is all that matters. I don’t need an audience for that, I don’t need readers or viewers. I will still share what I make just because art is meant to be shared and that feels right to me, but I am not going to value my art off the engagement it garners or fails to garner.
Stepping away for a few years was needed. I dove into my creativity as a way to save me from the crushing loss of what I had wanted to do with my life. I had used it as the one thing I needed to make work in order to complete myself. Now it is a fun activity that takes effort but is still enjoyable. I have always been drawn to type two fun.
See there are two types of fun, type one fun is something like a roller coaster or watching a movie. Type two fun takes effort and is enjoyable in the pursuit but has ups and downs too. Think of something like camping, or hunting, or mountain climbing, or writing or film making. It’s a type of fun in the struggle to accomplish something, to create something. That is the type of fun that has always drawn me in. The type that has you asking yourself why as you struggle to make the last pitch on a climb or drag a dead deer out of a swamp or go back and revise your work or re shoot something to make it perfect. The joy comes from the doing.
To be honest, it is rewarding to do something that not a lot of people can do. Even if they are bad books I can still say I have written books, multiple books. Even if they are bad movies I can still say I have written, directed, acted and edited a movie (one of which won an award so I was doing something right). Or to be able to lift four or five hundred pounds of weight off the ground, or run for 50 kilometers. Being able to do something that the majority of people could only imagine feels neat. Feels special. But then you end up in a group of people who are all doing that thing and you think that it’s not special because there are three thousand other people running the marathon or the other guy at the gym is lifting a hundred pounds more than you, or that author got their book published or has an audience or has written more.
When you are in the community of doers you compare yourself to them and think that what you are doing is less, or not as special. It’s easy to forget that you are still in the minority. That you are still doing something unique and exciting. It doesn’t make you better than anyone else but it still feels cool knowing you can do or have done something that billions of people will never do.
I am off on a tangent now. I guess I will wrap this up by saying it’s nice to have a healthy relationship with my hobbies, with things I am supposed to enjoy. It’s nice to finally find the joy in them again. It’s nice to recover from failure whatever that means.