Do you want to be an artist? Do you want to be novelist, a screenwriter, a director, an actor, a musician? Then I urge you to read this magnificent rant by Karina Meléndez about her experience with wannabes in the prestigious UBC Creative Writing Program. And then please never, never, never do any of those things.
I’ve written before about why I think the professional creative game breaks artists, especially when it can take a long time for a person to come into her art. And I have seen what Karina describes a hundred times in workshops, at parties, on blogs — wannabes who have already bought into some version of Real Artists are Born, not Made. It’s hard, because there are just enough young geniuses out there that when we are learning our art, we almost always run into a couple. They shine early, they get attention and approval, they are special; and they make the rest of us feel inadequate and frightened and desperate to shine as well.
And here is what happens then: the goal for students in programs or workshops becomes not to learn, but to be validated. Because if one has something to learn, well, yeeps, that means you aren’t there, sister, you’re no genius, you’re not a Real Artist. Go drown your inadequacies at the Losers Pub: the rest of us will be here defending our Precious Genius to the death, explaining that people just don’t get how good we really are.
And resisting with all our might the essential qualities of real artists: self-honesty, vulnerability, and a hunger for learning so fierce and relentless that you’ll take a lesson wherever you find it — because real artists make themselves.
There’s a reason that a person’s art is commonly referred to as her work. It’s not coincidence or just a wacky way to use that crazy word. You want to be a real artist? Do the fucking work. Yes, it’s hard, and it can be the most please-just-shoot-me-now combination of frustration and despair and blazing hot I will do this somehow hope that you may ever feel about anything except possibly falling in love; and that’s when you finally learn that art is the way that real artists love themselves.
So what do you want? What’s more important, loving yourself and your art with such fierce passion that you’ll do whatever you must to make both of you better? Or being so frightened of the work and the life that you’ll spend all that energy instead on superstitious behavior, or complaining that no one gets your work, or refusing to be honest, or withholding your support from others. Spend all that precious never-get-it-back energy on trying to make everyone around you see you as a genius. Oh, baby, that’s like trying to make someone say they love you. Making them say it doesn’t make it true.
