My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [6]
Make a spreadsheet, a wall chart, or a 3D diorama to track your progress. Take a page from Molly Crabapple and get your friends in on the act: “For big, long-term goals, I’ve found loudly bragging about what I’m going to do makes me do it,” says the award-winning illustrator for such fine institutions as Marvel comics, The New York Times, and Playgirl. “Otherwise, I have to face the humiliation of public failure.” (Talk about incentive.)
Bottom line: You’re a smart kid. So if you don’t have a plan about how you’re going to meet this so-called freelance life head-on, time to get cracking.
Chapter 2
Forget Fuzzy Math
Get real with your finances—and get over the notion that artists have to starve
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”
—Andy Warhol
A couple years ago I attended a business conference for writers and visual artists. One of the main panels was on how to blend creativity and commerce without winding up on your office floor in the fetal position, a shell of the woman you were before you served your soul on a silver platter to the Man. After forty-five minutes of hearing half a dozen painters and illustrators elaborate on how it’s next to impossible for an emerging artist to cobble together a living on watercolors and lithographs alone (no way!), someone in the audience asked what each of the panelists did for fallback income. One up-and-comer on the panel copped the “I am an Artiste!” attitude that drives me nuts. It goes something like this: “I don’t have a fallback. Having a fallback is like falling down, or admitting defeat. It’s like giving up on my artistic ambitions altogether. I might as well just trade in my easel now if I’m going to fall back.”
So basically this Vincent Van Schmo would rather sell his paintings at the farmers market and eat Saltines for dinner than taint his Talent with any lowly commercial work.
Yeah right. And I’m the queen of Sheba.
The Beauty of Bread-and-Butter Work
If you’ve read The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube, my book on alt career paths, you know that although I’m a big fan of following your creative bliss, I’m also a big fan of fallback skills, backup plans, and bread-and-butter work that keeps you clothed, fed, and warm at night. I mean, what’s so noble about starving? Where’s the honor in sleeping on a subway grate?
Nobility, to me, is using your creative talents to invent a job for yourself and getting paid a decent wage to do it. It’s taking on corporate, commercial, or commissioned work so you don’t have to stress about pursuing the creative projects that thrill you most but (perhaps initially) pay the least. Maybe your master plan is to one day support yourself with your dazzling jewelry and silk-screened T-shirt line. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with applying your artist’s eye to some money-in-the-bank work designing blogs, brochures, and wedding invitations so you can feed both yourself and your creative sideline.
Besides, taking on bread-and-butter work gives you structure, which we procrastinating creative types desperately need. It gives you a chance to beef up your marketable skills (in this fickle employment market, you can’t have too many). And it gives you validation in your decision to go solo, not to mention a bone to throw those family members still lamenting that you quit your day job to walk dogs, caulk bathrooms, or hawk vibrators.
More often than not, your breadwinning work will help fuel your enthusiasm for the screenplay, crocheted handbags, or life-size ceramic replica of Margaret Cho you’re chipping away at on the side. The less time you have for your creative projects, the more you can’t wait to return to them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that.
For many, the breadwinning