One of the biggest challenges of being self-employed in a creative field is that you get to do what you love all day — and get paid for it.
“Wait!” you say. “Just how exactly is THAT a challenge. That’s what I WANT!”
Just try it for a while, and you’ll see what I mean. Turning your hobby into your vocation can be a tricky transition. After all, this — writing, acting, dancing, photographing, singing, making jewelry — USED to be your refuge. It USED to be the thing you turned to when the stress of every day life was getting to you, when you needed to escape, when you needed to indulge yourself.
Now, it may be part of the stress of everyday life. It may become something you need to escape from — when it doesn’t go well, when a deadline is looming and your brain won’t start, when a promising project yields a heap of rejections and no hope of a paycheck. After you’ve rehearsed all day, are you really going to want to sit down for an hour and work on your scales and technique? After you answer an editor’s questions about seemingly every picayune (to you) detail under the sun, are you going to want to start on a short story or an essay? Or are you going to melt into a puddle of exhausted protoplasm in front of the TV?
There’s also the issue of money: We used to steal away time and spend money on our hobby; now it’s our livelihood. There are two traps we can fall into.
The first is undervaluing ourselves: We are so thrilled to be writing, painting, performing, creating, that we barely care that anyone pays us for it, or that, when they do, they pay us so little that we are making 50 cents an hour. Woo hoo! We think. I’m a WORKING writer. Someone’s giving me MONEY for this. How cool is THAT?!
But the other pitfall is to think exclusively in terms of money: Yes, “How much will this pay?” has to be one of the first questions we ask when we take on something new. We have to consider whether a project will contribute to our mortgage, our health insurance, our bottom line. We HAVE to think that way — but we CAN’T let it kill our art. We have to also consider what a project might contribute to our souls.
Here’s the thing: When you are an avocational artist, you don’t deal with the business side of your art. You don’t have to be a perfectionist, or worry about your reputation in your artistic community. (You may, but you don’t have to.) You don’t have to deal with deadlines and their effect on how you write. You don’t have money issues to contend with, the profit and loss calculations that need to be made before you spend money on materials for a new art project. You probably won’t have your performances reviewed — and even you you did, those reviews will most probably not launch or stall a career.
As a professional creative you need to deal with all of these issues – but you don’t have to let them ruin your art. Compartmentalize them a bit. This is the “job” part of what you do, It has to get done, but it serves your art — not the other way around. Let SOME of your projects fall outside of your business thinking. Allow yourself plenty of creative time to experiment, without thinking of a near-term return on your investment of time and materials. After all, if this was ONLY about making money, it’s not the field you would have chosen to work in. (We hope!)
Remember: Part of the artist’s reward is an “emotional paycheck” that you get from doing what you love. So be sure you structure your work-days to have time to nurture that love. It’s what will keep you going through the challenges, rejections, indifferent reviews, poor sales figures, and empty auditoriums that ALL of us confront at some point in our careers.
