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Archive for the ‘Musing on Creativity’ Category

Creative Careers: The Invisible Barrier to Entry

Posted in Freelancing, Musing on Creativity, tagged , , , on August 25, 2009 | 4 Comments »

It’s the end of summer, and I am scheduling my last few piano students into their slots for the fall. Invariably, over the summer, there has been some attrition. There always is, especially when kids turn about 14. Sometimes, the kid can be encouraged to continue, but too often the parent has lost the stomach for the continued battle about practicing and raises the white flag.  When a child doesn’t have much musical aptitude and hasn’t learned to feel joy in playing music after several years, 14 may be a good time to quit, but as a teacher, it always hurts to see musically sensitive kids quit for no better reason than “piano is hard.”

At the same time, I’ve taken a week off to get my workload in order for the fall: Writing and piano, both. I’ve got some gigs coming up in piano,  some travel scheduled, a book coming out, and I’m writing up a frenzy as the ecotourism writer for Suite101. So at the same time that I’m thinking about why kids don’t succeed at piano, I’m thinking about why writers do, and don’t, succeed in this brave new world of Internet writing.

Turns out that grown-up writers and teenage piano students have a lot in common.

The Internet has radically changed writing careers. It has undoubtedly destroyed some.  Growing like some exotic weed, it has out-competed the traditional denizens of journalism: the print media. Magazines and newspapers are folding, editors are losing jobs, and writers with long careers are being displaced by “citizen journalists” and young upstarts on the Internet who don’t mind working for a few dollars an article.

The barriers to entry have come down. Or at least we think they have. And the barbarians are at the gate with their bad grammar and cliches. 

It has never been exactly easy to make a living as an independent creative.  At the same time,  the barriers to entry in writing and some other fields, such as acting, have always been deceptively low, which may be why so many people who can’t write and can’t act think they have a shot at these supposedly glamorous careers.  Unlike photography (where you need, or at least, used to need, lots of expensive equipment),  or music (where you need an instrument and the ability to play it), anyone can try to declare himself or herself an actor or a writer. 

Yet barriers did, and do, exist. Skill has always mattered, and so have contacts. To succeed, you needed to get good skills in front of people who could hire you. Bad writers and bad actors didn’t so much out-compete good ones for jobs as they muddied up the waters and made it harder for professionals to find their way to editors and managers.  

These barriers to entry have never stopped anyone from throwing a hat into the ring, but they had a lot to do with who got passed through to the next level. Oh, and they gave us someone to blame if we didn’t make it.

Today, technology has opened the field: Writers can connect directly with readers on the Internet; with the rise of digital camera, photographers no longer need to invest $30,000 in equipment to be able to take consistent professional shots; musicians can put out their own demo CDs with equipment that costs under $1000; and actors can get their shorts up on Youtube.

So, have the barriers to entry really fallen?  

I doubt it. True, in my current Interent writing gig, the barriers to entry are seemingly low. There is an application process, but in truth, it doesn’t seem very rigorous to someone who cut her teeth in national print magazines and major newspapers.

However, to succeed at this gig is a very different story.  The financial model is, on the surface, distressingly different than the old model of “write a story, get a check.”  Instead, income dribbles in over months and years, and it seems to take forever for those first pennies to turn into dollars; for them to turn into enough dollars takes even longer, inconceivably longer if you happen to have been one of those writers who used to make a couple of bucks a word writing national magazine service stories.  Succeeding in this new world — making enough money on the stories to justify the time spent writing them — is  possible, although not easy. I’ve done the math six ways from Sunday, and I’ve measured the information people share about their earnings against mine, and no matter how I figure it, it’s worth the work. But it’s a long-term game. Just like learning piano, which has so far taken me about 40 years. 

And maybe it was learning piano — the discipline, the patience, the ability to understand this long-term process of continual effort and ultimate reward — that has given me the outlook necessary to succeed in writing.  I think that what a lot of people — adults and kids, both –  really want when they say they want to write, or play music, has nothing to do with the actual work itself : the practice, the day-in-day-out engagement with subject matter, technique, and skill. They want a magic pill that will do all that for them, so they can get to the real fun — the rewards of having written a book, the applause at the end of a show, and hopefully, a really big paycheck.

And THAT is the new barrier to entry in the arts. Only it’s not so new.

In the old days, we could blame those old barriers: how hard it was to get an editor’s attention, how expensive camera equipment was, how impossible it was to get a recording deal or an audition. The Internet has blown all that away — and it turns out that  it was nothing more than a big smokescreen that concealed the real barrier to entry, which is something we should have known all along.  

What it takes to succeed in the arts is the same as it always has been: the desire and drive to get up and do it today and tomorrow and the next day. To do it well, to manage the work smartly, to keep doing it even when it doesn’t pay off, to set a course and stay with it, to learn the ropes and techniques, to believe that it will happen even when you strike a plateau and can’t find a way up from it. You have to make smart business decisions, yes; as there ever have been, there are plenty of companies and individuals who would love to underpay you for your work. You have to find business models that make sense to you, but then you have to stick with them. You have to do the work. And even more, you have to love the work.

And, as my piano students, and some of my fellow writers are finding, that may be the biggest barrier to entry of all.

And if we don’t succeed? Maybe this time, we have only ourselves to blame.

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The Best Career Decision I Ever Made

Posted in Freelancing, Musing on Creativity on November 21, 2008 | 1 Comment »

I still remember my parents’ reactions, 30 years ago, when I declared I was going to major in piano.

You would have thought I had announced a death. 

And in a way, I had: My decision was seen as nothing less than career suicide. I had started out as a pre-med, not so much because I wanted to become a doctor, but because kids with high math and science scores were steered that way and I had no better ideas of my own. But pre-med was never a good fit (for one thing, you kind of had to go to classes), and after I fell in with an arty crowd, any hope of passing organic chemistry was quickly extinguished. I don’t remember how exactly it was that I found myself staring up at the practice rooms at the music school, listening to the sounds of Beethoven Sonatas and Chopin Ballades pouring out into the plaza below, wondering if I could get in, wondering if I should audition. I’m thinking it was some combination of late adolescent angst, hubris, misplaced ambition, romanticism, and I think a broken heart may have figured in there somewhere (Not you, David). Somehow, I got the process started, and got through the application and the audition. I don’t remember what I thought the future would hold: I was certainly given no reason to believe that my talents were in any way exceptional at this level of playing, or that being a concert pianist was really in the cards. But I was 19, and I’m sure I didn’t think the rules of life applied to ME. I still thought anything was possible, while at the same time, I didn’t have a clue as to what that might mean, or require. Still, something drew me to the practice rooms to struggle with Mussourgsky and Chopin and Bach and Bartok.   

Later, I compounded my career choice ”disaster” by taking an internship as a writer, working for the former music critic of the Chicago Tribune. At the end of my senior year, I strode out into the world armed with my music degree and writing internship.

And became a bank teller. 

But only for a while: I was eager to write and to play music, and so I wrote and played. I landed some freelance writing assignments and a handful of music gigs: accompanying here, recording there, playing at a few dinner parties and such. It wasn’t a great living, but it was a great life, and I could make the rent. Finally, I got a “real” job working for a tiny music magazine. 

Why this trip down memory lane? Quite simply, for some years now, it has become more and more apparent to me that majoring in music and becoming a writer and musician and music teacher (not to mention editor, blogger, and photographer) is probably the best career decision I’ve ever made. I think about all the “sensible” choices I could have made instead — all those business jobs people have where they can’t even explain to their kids what exactly it is that they do all day – and wonder if I would even have survived them. Not to mention the vulnerability to layoffs, which I think has to be one of the most frightening things in the world. Being an independent writer and musician has never made for the most lucrative living, but it has made for an incredibly rich life. 

I know I’ve been lucky. But I also know that there is something very tangible and real to the notion of “following your bliss.” Martin Luther said, when asked why he took on the entire Roman Catholic Church and nailed his complaints to the wall in Wittenberg, “Ich kann nicht anderes.” (“I cannot do otherwise.”)  I feel the same way about pursuing creative work and working for myself. And when you “cannot do otherwise,” then you MUST do your best.

In this economy, it seems that every day brings news of more jobs lost, more stores closing, more disasters just down the road. I am grateful every day that I practiced seriously enough and long enough that I can play the piano well, that I know how to teach and enjoy doing it, that I love to write, and that I have been able to find outlets and markets and clients – not always the ones I want, not always when I want them, but they are always there, somewhere. If I keep showing up, so does the work.

I think that my mom and dad STILL worry that I’m in imminent danger of losing the house, of not making ends meet, and possibly, of moving back into the bedroom I had when I was six. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I’m not sure if there’s a secret to freelance success, but I can tell you what has kept me feeling in control (all the while knowing that control is an illusion): For me, it’s been living quite conservatively,  paying off credit cards, not overextending on weird mortgages, keeping track of income and outgo, making necessary adjustments, working long hours when the work is there, and always keeping an eye out for the next gig. 

So thanks for the piano lessons, mom and dad. Thanks for taking me to the library every week so I could learn to love reading and books. You may not have convinced me to become a doctor, but in a weird sort of way, you gave me the tools to be happy. When the thing you love is your job — you never really have to work. You do it the way you breathe.

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Do Artists Have A Personality Type?

Posted in Musing on Creativity, tagged on October 7, 2008 | 2 Comments »

I don’t know how long this link will be good for, so check it out while it’s live; it’s interesting:

http://jobs.aol.com/article/_a/whats-your-work-style/20080925115109990001?icid=100214839x1211087552x1200672438

It’s a personality test (quick and free). You answer four either/or questions, and the test assigns you a letter for each answer. Putting the four letters together identifies you as one of sixteen personality types. You may already have heard of or taken a version of this test; it’s based on the Myers Briggs test, which is sometimes used by employers to see how well candidates match certain job categories; this version is severely truncated and condensed, but it’s quick and fun.

Is it accurate? You tell me: It’s easy to be cynical about these tests, but I was interested to find that my “personality type” put me in the category of people who are (among other things) best suited to be musicians, writers, photographers, journalists, editors, and educators — which pretty much describes my work life.

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Routine and Chaos

Posted in Musing on Creativity, tagged on September 18, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Quite a few years ago, I got into a fitness routine, stopping every evening at a gym by a subway stop on my way home from work. It was an easy habit to get into. When I went freelance, my exercise routine went by the wayside. I felt like I had all this freedom, all this time, to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Not surprisingly, my workout got bumped by the various unessential urgencies that come up every day, and mornings turned to afternoons turned to evenings and my workout never happened.  

These days, I find I have the same problem with practicing and getting started on a huge writing project. The funny thing is, I liked working out (back then, at least) and I love practicing and writing. And I know that all three are good for me.

Igor Stravinsky once said “From your discipline comes your freedom,”  and aside from its unfortunate resemblance to an infamous Nazi German variation – words with far more dangerous and deadly implications — I like what I hear in this quote. I think Stravinskly is saying that when we hone our craft, we are free to create works that accurately reflect our intentions. Having craft, skill, and technique gives us the language of our art, and with more language, we are free to say exactly what we mean, unlimited by technical problems. As our abilities grow, our art can become more complex and more nuanced.   

I’m thinking of this today because a student commented that she didn’t understand why she could make appointments to take care of everyone else’s needs — her son, her husband, her ailing relatives — but she couldn’t manage to make time for herself. This talented and advanced pianist finds that practice is food for her soul, yet she is having trouble prioritizing something that is crucial to her sense of well-being. “I’m going to start making appointments for myself and writing them in my diary. And I’m going to keep them,” she told me, which sounds like a good idea to me. 

Sometimes it’s a measure of how busy we are (and God knows, as freelancers and self-employed people, we should never complain about having work to do).  Sometimes the task we desperately want to take on –starting a novel, learning a whole Beethoven Sonata — is so big that it intimidates us. Sometimes the smaller day-to day urgencies of life — our personal lives, our deadlines, our bread-and-butter work — take over.  Sometimes we are just plain scared to start. 

For most people, whether it’s writing or exercising or practicing, mornings are best. The earlier in the morning, the greater the chance that you can just get it done, without being interrupted  by the pile-up of everyday life. Unfortunately, I’ve been suffering from insomnia, and when I finally do get to sleep, I want to stay that way. Mornings have always been difficult for me.

Taking a class or meeting regularly with peers is another way to make sure we stay on top of our game: No one wants to show up unprepared, or with a half-assed project. If we study with a private teacher, we have weekly assignments; the deadline pressure may help us get our act together. If it’s a peer group, we’ll want to have our short story as honed as possible, or our performance piece polished.

However  we do it, carving out some inviolable time that is simply for us to use for ourselves may be the best thing we can do for our careers, our skills, our longevity as artists — and our souls.

How do you hone your craft — and keep it honed?  Please comment…

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I’ll Write This Post Tomorrow

Posted in Musing on Creativity, Writing, tagged , on September 9, 2008 | 3 Comments »

The best way I know to get all my housework done — vacuuming, kitchen floors, laundry, even the garden’s overdue weeding — is to give me a deadline. Not a housework deadline, a writing deadline.

I don’t know what it is about writers and deadlines, but I fall smack in the middle of the stereotype. I’m anticipating getting the go-ahead on an assignment today. The first bit will be due on Wednesday, and I’m already bouncing back and forth between panicking over the deadline, and trying to think of everything else I have to do first. Everything else being, of course, all those things that will then become so important that I turn to them before the assignment.

A while back I procrastinated on a book deadline by reading a book on overcoming procrastination.

Actually, I learned a lot from that book (and yes, I did get my own book written, — and on time, thank you very much). For a long time, it actually helped in the area of organizing files, vanquishing paper monsters, and handling financial stuff like reading the damn insurance policy and sending in my invoices so I can get paid. (Oops, that reminds me…)

I was pretty enthusiastic about the results: My desk (which, as it turns out, is a lovely natural cherry wood color) now has enough room for a coffee cup AND a plate of cookies, and I no longer have to balance the cup on a pile of old magazines, where it crazily tilts and threatens to spill over onto the notes from a trip three months ago. I can find my address book now (yes, I still have a paper address book. I know how to use it, you see).  

Success breeds success, I thought, so I decided that my new and improved attitude (David, don’t bother to comment here — this was BEFORE you moved in….yes, there’s been some backsliding since then) could be applied to my writing. 

And I made an effort, I really did: I started stories weeks before they were due. I had time to make all my calls to sources, do extra interviews, find out really cool extra stuff (which I usually couldn’t include because of word limits, but that’s the biz, you know?), and I wrote and rewrote and you know what? These carefully scheduled stories turned out to be crap. The day before the piece was due would find me in a panic, with everything erased (deliberately) on my computer, and with me starting on an entirely different path. And then something would click, and the piece would get written in the nick of time and — it would be good. The only difference was that instead of having spent my usual, say, 10 hours on it, I would have spent  maybe 40 hours spinning my wheels. Since I work in a field where payment rates have been steadily dropping for four decades, this is not smart, in the making-a-living sense of the word.

I’m not trying to make excuses here to justify bad habits; maybe I could have made more effort, or at least tried not procrastinating a while longer. Truth? I was just as glad to go back to the bad old ways. But in my defense, I have to say that I honestly think that with a certain kind of writing, I work better with a bit of an edge, and some of that is provided by the deadline pressure — the fact that NOW I’m REALLY working on it, and I have to REALLY concentrate or I’ll miss the deadline and the editor will never hire me again and the bank will come and take my house.  I find that this is especially true for short servicey pieces that need crisp, clever word twists to be any fun. The inspiration (for lack of a less pretentious word) for those seems to come from a certain point of pressure that’s difficult to simulate when you KNOW you have hours and hours to come up with something better.

I will say though that everyone grows up. I did kind of like the fact that starting a piece weeks before it was due meant that there were no more nail-biting incidents at 11 p.m., like when I’m hoping the source will call me back by 8 a.m. when I absolutely MUST send the article in…

So here’s my compromise, and it seems to be working. I do all my hard research and interviewing up front, and I make sure I have all my back-up sources lined up. I outline the article. I think about it, maybe even scribble a lede and a nut graph and I see whether some sort of structure seems to be emerging. I talk about the story (sometimes, if I’m having trouble finding its arc). THEN, having laid down this nice safety net I wait until the article is near due — and THEN (and only then) I get to work.

In the meantime, if you’re reading this because you’re — uh — not writing your OWN article, here’s a link you should check out: http://www.projectsidewalk.com/images/flowchart2.jpg

And, proving that this is a nearly universal issue, here are more thoughts on the subject:

Visit Gloria Chadwick at http://tinyurl.com/6za4m5

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Lessons from My Neighbor: An Evening with Karen Allen

Posted in Film, Musing on Creativity, Performing, tagged , , , , on August 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Actress Karen Allen lives two towns away from me, and in a rural area where everyone knows everyone, that makes her practically a next door neighbor. I used to teach her son piano.

Last night, Karen was on the schedule to speak at one of our community venues:  The Monterey General Store, located in teeny Monterey, Massachusetts, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The Monterey General Store (http://www.montereystore.com /)  is in fact, a general store: You can buy sandwiches there, and soda, and ice cream bars, and an unbelievable number of different brands of potato chips. But the store is also a big supporter of community culture and crafts. They sell llama wool from a farm down the road, and pottery with images of leaves of the Berkshires imprinted in the clay, and  books by local authors, as well as a whole collection of CDs from local musicians who have played at the store’s weekly concert series (David and I have played there; our recently released CD (http://tinyurl.com/5l2sjj)  was recorded at one of our shows). Basically, there’s a raised area in the back, with tables and chairs, and everyone squeezes in. If there’s a big crowd (like, say, more than 30), the latecomers over-flow into the aisles by the frozen foods and the lunch meats.

For Karen’s talk, the store had gotten a lot of calls, so owner Kenn Basler moved the event across the street to the Congregational Church, which he laughingly calls the store’s “annex. ” (The Store presents concerts there a couple of times a year.)  The church easily held the 100 or so people who showed up; I’m not sure how we would have all fit in the store!

Karen brought a DVD containing three mini-features on the Indiana Jones films: These shorts featured actors, producers, and writers talking about how the films were made, the locations they were shot at, and some of the special effects (creepy crawlies, snakes, rats, lizards, alligators, and bugs). In between the shorts, Karen fielded questions from the audience about everything from working with John Belushi on Animal House to the dangers of filming stunts (She actually got burned filming the bar-burning scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the fire and beam-crashing-down sequence didn’t go quite as planned.)  

It’s always special to get to hear a world-class artist talk about his or her craft and experiences. It doesn’t matter if they are in the same field as you are. Speaking just for myself, I’ve never worked in film in any way, and the only TV experience I have is being interviewed for the news and consulting on an outdoor TV show. So this world is a wonderous mystery to me. I came away awed at what it takes to put a film together — and inspired to continue in my own creative work. 

Karen talked about her career — how it got started, the types of roles she’s sought and the types she’s turned down. She talked about the challenges for an actor of balancing a career with raising a child (A film set is not the most interesting place for a young kid, she pointed out: While a parent is on the set, a child is often left alone in trailers with tutors and babysitters; the novelty wears off after a few days). Karen talked about the ups and downs of an actor’s life: What union scale wages are, and about how most actors try to take on as many different things as possible — stage, TV, film, commercials — just to keep going, stay fresh, stay out there — just to WORK. (The arc of an actor’s career, she said, usually looks like a  stock market graph: up and down and up and down.)  She also talked about upcoming projects: She’s reading scripts for possible new films right now, and within the last few years, she has started a fiber arts design business (http://www.karenallen-fiberarts.com/) making and selling her own beautiful knitwear designs. She’s also teaching acting and directing plays at a local college. In other words, she’s doing exactly what so many creative people do: working in her primary artistic area (or, in her case, areas), teaching some, getting lucky with a big project, feeding the soul with “projects of the heart.”   

Karen’s love for the creative life and her sense of humor was evident in her responses to audience questions. What I’m often struck by when talking to successful artists, or when hearing them speak, is that they truly are in it for the passion they have for their creative work. I think it’s too easy for people looking in from the outside to think about “success” as equating “money.” We read about books that sell a million copies, or records that go platinum, or block-buster movies, and we might be tempted to think that those authors and musicians and actors have hit some sort of a lottery. But listening to Karen speak, and knowing her personally, I was reminded that success is really a side effect of the work itself. A very pleasant side effect, I’m sure, but not the reason for doing it.

It’s about the work — and about loving what you do.

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The Balancing Act

Posted in Business Issues, Freelancing, Musing on Creativity, tagged on August 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

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.

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Rejection: It’s Nothing Personal

Posted in Freelancing, Musing on Creativity, tagged on August 28, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Rejections: There is no such thing as an artist who doesn’t encounter them.

Voltaire called Shakespeare’s Hamlet the “work of a drunken savage.”  The San Francisco Examiner told Rudyard Kipling that he “didn’t know how to use the English language.” Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead was rejected because the editor thought there would be no audience for it. (“It won’t sell” was the verdict given to a book that has been in print for more than half a century, and sold tens of millions of copies around the world). 

And on and on and on. (If you don’t believe me, check http://tinyurl.com/653uao, which culls some of the rejections and reviews from Rotten Reviews & Rejections, edited by Bill Henderson & Andre Bernard. http://tinyurl.com/66xmxc)

So when we get those ugly little “thanks but no thanks” missives, we can soothe ourselves that we’re in good company. Even so, rejections can be hard to take. Here are a few things to help you get through them — and learn from them:

  • It’s not personal. Truly. A rejection simply means that on that day, that particular editor or producer or director or gallery owner did not see how taking on your project would enhance his or her business. There could be a thousand reasons, and many of them have nothing to do with you, the quality of your work, or its ultimate marketability.
  • Rejections means your work is getting out there, getting seen. It is knocking on doors, introducing itself to the artistic community at large.
  • Sometimes people who can’t use your work today are kind enough to give you some hints as to how you might make it more marketable, or how you might improve it. Take these suggestions to heart: Most editors, producers (etc.) are far too busy to waste the time it takes to write such a critique on someone who they don’t think has promise or talent.  
  • Success is often a numbers game. You’re working your way through the no’s to get to a final yes.
  • “No” doesn’t ALWAYS mean “no.” Sometimes it means “try again later.” I once had an editor call me a year after his supervisor had rejected a piece of mine: She was gone, he was now in charge, he remembered the piece and liked it and wanted to buy it. Editors change jobs, magazines change focus, bars change managers, galleries change owners. If you’re convinced a project has legs, send it out for another walk around the block.
  • Look for patterns. If you get 20 rejections and every single one of them references the same specific flaw, you might want to take another look at your project and see if there’s a way to fix it.
  • The person sending the rejection may be a complete fool. At least YOU don’t have to live with having been the person to turn down “Harry Potter.”

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Staying Fresh

Posted in Freelancing, Musing on Creativity on August 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

One of the challenges of being a self-employed creative person is that we tend to fall into what I have come to call “success ruts.” We get good at a certain type of writing, or music, or photography, or whatever, so we get clients. Then we get a reputation. Then we get called to do more of the same. It’s a benefit of specializing: Expertise gets you gigs.

Soon, we can do our ”thing” on auto-pilot. If we are writers covering a particular subject, we know the contacts, the resources, the websites, the new products — everything we need to spit out an article. If we’re musicians who play weddings, we can churn out “We are Family” and “Moondance” and  “Celebration” and the “Wedding Song,” and “The Macarena” in our sleep. But too many verses of ”Macarena,” and it starts to feel like just another day at the office.

How to stay fresh?

  • Mentally divide your work into the “bread and butter” category and the “shoot the moon” category. Your “bread and butter” work feeds your budget, your “shoot the moon” work feeds your soul. Both need attention, so be sure you budget time for both.
  • Look for ways to make your “bread and butter” work as creative and rewarding as possible: I love finding ways to make “how-to” writing more interesting and fun using creative turns-of-phrase or off-beat anecdotes.  If you’re a musician, sneak a few different songs into your standard set lists. If you’re a heat-shot photographer, experiment with a couple of original, even wacky, poses.
  • Make a plan for a long-term “shoot the moon” project, and commit a certain amount of time per day to it. Mornings are best if you can hack them (like a lot of artists, I have trouble with that) because you can get your time in before the exigencies of the workday start interrupting and derailing your intentions.  
  • Let some fresh air in: If you’re a musician, go to a concert by someone you’ve never heard of. If you’re a writer, pick up a book by a new-to-you author.  If you’re a visual artist, haunt the local galleries. See what’s new, what others are doing. 
  • Pick a small project to work outside your comfort zone. if you’re a non-fiction writer, try a short story. If you’re a classical pianist, try your fingers at a jazz song. If you usually photograph in color, try a black and white session. Who knows, you may find that your definition of what can work for you as a “bread and butter” project can be expanded to include a lot more variety and challenge.        

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Writer’s Block

Posted in Musing on Creativity, tagged , on August 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

My entry to the blogging world is starting with a very quiet little whimper.  My subject – OUR subject —  is creativity — how to live it, work it, play with it — and all I can think of to start is Writer’s Block, except it doesn’t seem to be one block, but a whole pile, stacked in front of me like a brick wall. This is a virgin blog, with all the awkwardness and all the high hopes. I feel every bit as nervous as I would stepping out onto an empty stage with a full audience for the first time.  

Well, I expect no one will be reading for a good long while. But if you are, here’s what this is about: Creating a creative life.  And making it work. 

Who am I to tell you? Well, I’m someone who has been working in various creative fields, and mostly making it work, for upwards of 18 years now. I’m a writer, a music teacher, and a musician, and I’ve also worked as a photographer, TV consultant, writing coach, publishing consultant, editor, public speaker, and a whole bunch more (including but not limited to shoveling out horse barns and washing dishes).

For the last 18 years, I’ve been self-employed, mostly writing books, magazine articles, and internet stories. Most are about the outdoors and travel, and a bunch more are about music. I’ve written 12 books, been translated into 6 languages (that I know of), I’ve played keyboards in places ranging from Chicago bars to an Indiana Riverboat to a general store in Monterey, Massachusetts — to barn to churches to fancy old hotels to a couple of gazebos, a farmer’s market or two, and a few bonafide recital halls. I’ve taken photos that have wound up on book covers and calendars. And I’ve taught a gazillion piano lessons.  If you want to know more, check out www.KarenBerger.com or www.hikerwriter.com.  

Along the way, people have asked: How do you live your dream? How do you make it work?  Pay the mortgage and the insurance and the heating oil bill? How do you find the jobs, the discipiline, the balance?

Truth it, it’s mostly a day-by-day thing, and way too often, an accident.  You wake up and glare at the deadline, then you do it, then you do the next thing. Stuff interrupts. Bad stuff, like an impenetrable notice from the insurance company saying that basically you’re going to have to win the lottery to afford health care next year. Good stuff, like a surprise note from an editor giving you enough work to pay said insurance bill. Bad stuff — the heating  bill (have I MENTIONED the heating bill?). Good stuff, like a royalty check. And on it goes.

In the process of getting from one day to the next,  I’ve talked with lots of people, both those who have made the plunge into the creative economy, and those who would like to.

In doing and talking and listening and living, I’ve learned some things, and this blog is to share them . Stay tuned.

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