Deconstructing Creative Angst

I. For Its Own Sake

There is doing for the sake of doing, which might also be called doing for the sake of the self. Writing, drawing, playing an instrument in the spirit of the child who sings quietly in the shallow bathtub. Relaxed concentration, seeing what comes. “Fulfilling” is both too big and too small though if pressed, yes, you might say it is that. But such absorption eliminates boundaries, separation. Presence somehow leaks into absence, leaves no sense of a self to be filled. This is the foundation, the originating impulse. It’s what creators elaborate on and how they (we) begin to learn. Difficult yet essential to return to.

What argument can be made against this? No argument that is not contingent upon and tantamount to a denial of life itself.

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In One Continuous Mistake, Gail Sher writes, “If you are a writer, you have probably noticed that when you’re writing, it feels correct and when you are not writing (when there is no room for writing in your life), it feels incorrect.” I assume this bullseye statement can be repurposed for illustrators, musicians, any artist. When you don’t make time for painting, existence is inhospitable. When you don’t prioritize song, you are unsettled, disarranged. Ease in execution or a perfect final product are irrelevant. If you write/paint/dance, it will have a certain effect on you. Failing to do so will have another.

The suggestion inside this observation is that we should perform these acts because they align us with ourselves. They bring us if not peace than equilibrium. But the relief of equilibrium could be felt as a mark against, not for. Sher writes also of the fear that attaches to allowing yourself what you desperately need (love, want): the tendency to disavow what is most dear as an ultimate and therefore forbidden indulgence, inherently wrong for how intensely it attracts. We might believe we don’t deserve quietude or ease or pleasure, that we estrange ourselves from the world whenever we’re not in terror and despair regardless of what our circumstances support. In times of hopelessness, guilt attaches to anything and everything including (especially?) the indispensable engineered into scarcity: food, fresh air, clean water, generosity, curiosity, joy.

Nobody reading this, and certainly not the person writing it, is without resources that many people don’t have. Listing the gifts would take days. (A computer, literacy, clean clothes, a home.) Probably you and I aren’t going to go without food or bathing for very long, even if we do it briefly as a form of protest or recreation. Forfeiting creation may, subconsciously, appeal as an alternate penance.

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Here’s a question for everyone who writes, paints, composes, etc., and is haunted by a sense that they’re wrong (bad, selfish, irresponsible) for doing so: if you give up your songs, your art, your poems, what will you replace them with? Where does that energy go? Is writing or art-making in the top five most frivolous things you do? If you were to make a list of all the wasteful ways you expend yourself, would imagination or journaling or rehearsal be on it? What good things happen when you stop? What good things are prevented if you persist?

II. For Connection

Eventually, usually, artists want other people to encounter what they’ve done. The act of creation does not call for justification or instrumentalisation, but it is natural and good to seek the involvement of others, to attempt contribution. Anything undertaken with care invites recognition; “care” itself points to external orientation, an offering. How neatly the wood has been stacked, how impeccably decorated the cake. It is not vain or greedy to hold the hope of social import, reception, meaning. Creation, like existence, is communication and communion: continuous reception and transmission, more circle than line.   

But which creations should be shared? Sound judgment is elusive. You might share out of pure ego but you can withhold out of ego, too. And just as we don’t unerringly know our own motivation, so we don’t necessarily see the value of our work. Indeed, that’s part of how and why other people come in. Their opinions are potentially useful even when “wrong,” like advice that clarifies you to yourself when you reject it.

The struggle of sharing doesn’t change when one gets more practiced. Probably the challenge is greater. I think of comedians who’ve mastered the expectant rhythm that signals for laughs regardless of what’s been said. And authors who can write elegant, poignant-sounding sentences of no consequence, and obscenely stupid movies that prick tears with a canny music swell. Whether or not to share, and how, and when, requires discernment separate from the aesthetic though equally exacting.

One temptation, thanks to the internet, is to post it all. Every fragment and half-thought and failed exercise. If people don’t like what they read or see or hear, they can move on. But our slop era is not the result of AI alone. Social media trains users in mindless, relentless reaction. The penchant for content creation hovers over minnows of potential thought like a starving hunter’s spear. Sometimes the point stabs detritus and one makes a meal of that instead. It will soon be forgotten, churned away by more of the same.

This galloping carelessness, this “easeful and abundant speech,” is bad for the brain and the soul, antithetical to art, optimism, and action. It is lacking in, if not fully devoid of, responsibility. It would be better, I think, indisputably, if we were more rigorous in deciding what of our work belongs where. To paraphrase one Quaker elder’s guidance at a Sunday meeting: most of what arises is intended for us alone. But if you perceive that a message will be of benefit to others, please convey it as clearly and succinctly as you can.

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In contrast, there exists a state of such unbearable sensitivity to responsibility that sharing is entirely foreclosed. Attention is finite, it’s true, and in the age of social media, it’s shredded to tatters, torn between urgent pleas for help and news of escalating doom. What right does anyone have, unless they are experiencing or addressing an acute crisis, to grab at a flayed edge? Merely making your work available can feel like entitlement, if you conceive of your work as jockeying with GoFundMes and ICE updates.

But that framing is falsely simplistic and courts the sort of inescapable, existential shame that makes suicide seem appropriate. You do not have to solve a problem, let alone the worst problems known to humanity, in order to create work worth sharing. On some level, this is known; I doubt anyone writing/creating right now fails to find sustenance in creations past and present: the music, the art, the poetry, the prayers. Sometimes this is the only sustenance there is. A decades- or centuries-old manuscript can be stunningly insightful and true and beautiful, a treasure that inspires bottomless gratitude, and yet it will not have ended war or eliminated rape or vanquished white supremacy or even, probably, fed any children.

It would be malevolently dishonest to claim that all forms of creative expression occur against or issue a challenge to empire. But without conscientious intervention, anxiety channels itself where and how the society directs, meaning it accumulates around objects of denigration and devaluation. Doordashing a little treat is harmless but making music is a waste of time. AI animates and reads lines better than you do, so why are you bothering with your illustration and your acting? The computer writes better short fiction, too, though somehow, simultaneously, there is no demand for stories in the first place. If you are sliding down the drain of how can I [x] at a time like this? please go back to these questions, and don’t just read them, answer them.

Much self-promotion is insincere and insipid; if you recognize that, I think you are unlikely to replicate it. But if you don’t feel good about what you’re offering—if you know, despite your best efforts to ignore it, that there’s something cynical and mean or uninformed and cowardly about what you’ve done—then you must take your hand off the doorknob, turn around, and go back to where you work. As I’ve said before, I felt this way about the earlier draft of An Honest Woman. No one, including me, will ever know if my assessment was accurate, but completing and promoting that version of the book would have been hellish, a gauntlet of defensiveness, embarrassment, self-doubt. You have to take your own work seriously enough to make a true effort. If it’s not that important to you, how can it become important to anyone else?

I try to live up to the title of this newsletter by providing something of personal relevance that holds up to revisitation and repeated readings, writing that conveys a sentiment or argument that sticks and is of use. It will never be that for everyone. Shortly after this essay goes out, multiple people will unsubscribe. But that’s exactly as it should be, both for me as a writer and for them as a person. Just as there is responsibility in publishing, so there is responsibility in choosing what we watch, listen to, and read. Many works aren’t meant for you to receive, and much work is not meant to be shared.

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If you feel good about what you’re offering and terrible about the conditions in which you offer it, you can think on that a little further.

III. For Money

I have a difficult time charging readers for my writing because I want people to read what I write. I want it to reach as many people as possible so the people for whom it resonates can find it/be found by it. Creating obstacles to access is counter to my own aims, especially when I write something with a political message, a defense of abortion or an attack on the state. Those pieces exist only to be read and circulated and understood. A horror story, to me, is the common scenario of a museum “acquiring” a work that is then kept from view indefinitely, for decades.

I don’t mind money coming into play with magazines or books. Naturally, you have to pay money for a book—it costs (a lot!) of money to make. A magazine with paid subscribers and ads should pay me for my work. But not readers themselves. I am approaching the number of subscribers here where my account will have to go from free to paid to accept any more sign ups, and at that point, the service becomes very expensive. I worry, a little, about what will happen when that time comes because of this aversion, but I also trust that I will figure it out.

I think it’s not always true that making money from your work changes the work you make, because you could conceivable go into your cave and come out with something fully formed that is then purchased as is. But usually, money changes it. Money changes you. The change could be net neutral or net positive but it would be naive to imagine it has no effect at all. It depresses me to see talented but relatively young/new writers do harm to their writing by monetizing it in newsletter form. This can happen to writers who get jobs as columnists, too. They get hardened into a shtick, their voice takes on a certain bitterness, their ideas develop along cramped tracks. I say this as someone who has never made a living exclusively from her writing, but there was a time when I thought I could push hard enough to do so. I gave it a try and found that the costs were too high. I didn’t like what workhorse writing was doing to me. I would rather make money a different way.

I also write this as someone who has, I think, been uncommonly, thoroughly transparent about her financial situation. (One of the first pieces I ever wrote as Charlotte, for The New Inquiry, was about my escort income. In 2016, I did a breakdown of all my writing and publishing income. I’ve shared my sales numbers and book advance.) Even writers who are avowed socialists or Marxists don’t like to talk about money publicly. I understand that doing so feels vulnerable, but the accepted silence is so disappointing. This isn’t just a matter of rate sharing being helpful to fellow writers, though obviously it is. When people hide their true financial situation, it provides cover for any and every decision they’re making, career-wise. Everyone has to eat, therefore I have to take this deal, this speaking gig, I can’t make waves at my college, I have to write for the outlets manufacturing consent for genocide. Yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s economically necessary for you but maybe not. “I agree that life must go on,” wrote Jean Guéhenno while living in Nazi-occupied Paris, of his colleagues who published in Nazi-controlled papers. “All the same, they’re in quite a hurry.”

Near the end of my escort career, I got an appointment request from a Heritage Foundation-associated lawyer who’s successfully argued many landmark cases at the Supreme Court, the ones that are so evil, even non-wonks know about them. I took a deposit, then sent it back and turned him down, but I still think about it. Should I have done it and given the money away? Should I have done it but thrown a drink in his face and screamed at him and then given the money away? Was his money so much worse than any other money I’d taken? Most of the men I saw lived on generations of stolen wage. One of them was a conservative commentator. I could go on.

For almost everyone, money—and the prestige and institutional approval it entails—activates the ego and disables the conscience in terrifying, illuminating ways. Do I really have to remove myself from the running for a PEN America award? What if I won but gave a speech about Palestine? What if I won and donated the money? What if I attended the ceremony but threw a drink in everyone’s face? How creative can I get without saying no? How much can I bend my morals without breaking them?

My point, I think, is that writing is one thing and money is another. But it’s really hard, conceptually, to keep them separate. It can take more work than the work itself.

IV. For Its Own Sake (Again)

Much of Prostitute Laundry is about my attempt to unlearn sex as labor, to relearn sex as something undertaken for me and not for a client. In order to have a chance at this I needed to abjure existing sexual habits and opportunities to try on new ones.

A similar warping happened to my writing brain after I spent a lot of time freelancing. Everything became a take, even topics or causes I cared about and knew were objectively important. I was entrenching patterns I came to despise, certain transitions and caveats that worked well for the current style of internet writing but were corrosive to most other modes of thought and composition.

When I was writing a silly trend piece, I was writing. And when I had mechanical or distracted or impatient sex as a means to an end, I was still having sex. I love sex and I usually loved sex work. I love writing and I have occasionally loved writing on demand: writing conceived of, pitched, developed with a specific buyer or/and audience in mind. But I needed greater flexibility—liberty—because creativity, sexual or literary, dies without it. And I didn’t see how I could have the freedom for improvisation and reflection and experimentation without uncoupling the primary action, the writing or the sex, from money. I wanted to get back to the beginner’s mind of singing in the bathtub. It took time but I think it has happened. Moreover, there is a belligerence in not writing for money that I find exhilarating, just as there was an exhilarating belligerence in not having sex for money. I don’t think this, the high of refusal, is talked about enough.

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We should each keep creating. We have to, in fact, and so we will. This is the absolute biggest “we” available—everyone, all human beings, for as long as we’re around. It’s just what we are and what we do. It needn’t be fought against or denied. Layers of complication settle on top of our creations that aren’t always about the work, insecurity around competition, uncertainty about sharing, anxiety about money—but you can use inquiry like a knife to slice those off and inspect them.

If you feel bad about your creating, what is the source of that feeling? What do you want to do about it?