Ignore Everybody - MacLeod, Hugh [15]
MANY YEARS AGO, BARELY OUT OF COLLEGE, I started schlepping my portfolio around the ad agencies, looking for my first job.
One fine day a creative director in a big corner office downtown kindly agreed for me to come show him my work. Hooray!
So I came to his office and showed him my work. Frankly, the work was bloody awful. All of it. Imagine the worst, cheesiest “I used to wash with Sudso but now I wash with Lemon-Fresh Rinso Extreme” vapid-housewife crap. Only far worse than that.
The creative director was a nice guy. You could tell he didn’t think much of my work, though he was far too polite to blurt it out. Finally he quietly confessed that it wasn’t doing much for him.
“Well, the target market is middle-class housewives,” I rambled. “They’re quite conservative, so I thought I’d better tone it down. . . .”
“You can tone it down once you’ve gotten the job and once the client comes after your ass with a red-hot poker and tells you to tone it down.” He laughed. “Till then, show me the toned-up version.”
This story doesn’t just happen in advertising. It happens everywhere.
It’s hard to sell out if nobody has bought in.
23. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
Everybody is too busy with their own lives to give a damn about your book, painting, screenplay, etc., especially if you haven’t finished it yet. And the ones who aren’t too busy you don’t want in your life anyway.
MAKING A BIG DEAL OVER YOUR CREATIVE shtick to other people is the kiss of death. That’s all I have to say on the subject.
24. Worrying about “Commercial vs. Artistic” is a complete waste of time.
You can argue about “Selling Out” versus “Artistic Purity” till the cows come home. People were kvetching about it in 1850, and they’ll be kvetching about it in 2150.
VIGOROUS DEBATE ABOUT COMMERCIALISM IN art is a path well trodden, and not a place where one is going to come up with many new, earth-shattering insights. But a lot of people like to dwell on it because it keeps them from ever having to journey into unknown territory. It’s safe. It allows you to have strong emotions and opinions without any real risk to yourself. Without your having to do any of the actual hard work involved in the making and selling of something you believe in.
To me, it’s not about whether Tom Clancy sells truckloads of books or a Nobel Prize winner sells diddly-squat. Those are just ciphers, external distractions. To me, it’s about what you are going to do with the short time you have left on this earth. Different criteria altogether.
Frankly, how a person nurtures and develops his or her own “creative sovereignty,” with or without the help of the world at large, is in my opinion a much more interesting subject.
25. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
Inspiration precedes the desire to create, not the other way around.
ONE OF THE REASONS I GOT INTO DRAWING cartoons on the back of business cards was that I could carry them around with me. Living in downtown New York, as I did back then, you spend a lot of time walking around the place. I wanted an art form that was perfect for that.
So if I was walking down the street and I suddenly got hit with the itch to draw something, I could just nip over to the nearest park bench or coffee shop, pull out a blank card from my bag and get busy doing my thing. Seamless. Effortless. No fuss. I like it.
Before, when I was doing larger works, every time I got an idea while walking down the street I’d have to quit what I was doing and schlep back to my studio while the inspiration was still buzzing around in my head. Nine times out of ten the inspired moment would have passed by the time I got back, rendering the whole exercise futile. Sure, I’d get drawing anyway, but it always seemed I was drawing a memory, not something happening at that very moment.
If you’re arranging your life in such a way that you need to make a lot of fuss between feeling the itch and getting to work, you’re putting