Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety

A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.” Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who he doesn’t like and who seems to be loudly and visibly struggling in his career.

Strangely, Jim is also getting close to his 50s, hasn’t done all the things he wants to do, and is also existing paycheck to paycheck, trying to live off his self-published work (which is quite good, in my opinion). The difference between them is the other guy whines loudly and constantly plugs his GoFundMe, while Jim works harder and (mostly) swallows his frustration.

Jim’s comments on social media are usually criticisms of people who complain about their difficult lives instead of working hard like him. I can accept that attitude. If anyone has earned the right to be scornful of the weak, it’s someone who started off in a weak position and made themselves strong or, in Jim’s case, perhaps marginally stronger. Still, it doesn’t feel good when his angst rises and he starts punching down.

His pronouncement above sounds like flinty entrepreneurial wisdom—Yoda in a self-made, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vein: do or do not (in your career, in your life); there is no try. But I know his criticism and anger are rooted in his own insecurities, not in some external source. We’re always the most critical of our own family, our own friends, our own professional colleagues, members of our own communities and cultures because, when they fail, it makes us feel like we’re next.

Jim was, to use a trendy term, “triggered,” and he had to release the vapors. We all have that friend who tries to speak like a philosopher or social critic as a way of purging anxiety and legitimating his concerns. Sometimes, I do that, too. So I’m not trying to be inordinately critical of Jim or except myself from a behavior that seems common among sensitive people, particularly artists and writers. If you’re not bothered by something, you usually have little motivation to write or speak about it publicly, especially on a blog or in a magazine op-ed or on social media. But in order to understand the criticism Jim’s making, we also have to know something about arts communities and social timing.

A creative community, whether physical (like a writer’s colony, a brick-and-mortar magazine, or a college art program) or on social media, is a perpetual knife fight in a submarine. It goes without saying that in every creative field, money is always tight, careers are always precarious, hyper-competitiveness is the rule, commercialism undercuts everything, and exploitation is a fact of life.

These hardships and uncertainties naturally produce immense anxiety, since survival is always at issue on some level, even when you ostensibly “make it” and get famous. As the actress, Jewel Staite, drolly notes on her Twitter profile, “I like routine, predictability, and living a non-stressful existence, which is why I’ve chosen the film industry.” That’s darkly funny. But it’s also true: life as an artist isn’t simple or calm. You don’t get job security, even when people know who you are. You’re always on the make.

Keeping this in mind makes it easier to see how tearing down other creatives can become a Malthusian side hustle. If they’re wounded, the instinct may be to kick them where it hurts. If they’re down, put your foot on their back. Do unto others before they can do unto you. More table scraps for you that way. You’ll feel less vulnerable, less likely to die in poverty and obscurity, less hopeless, lost, and ashamed that you ever considered yourself worthy to live a creative life.

If publicly criticizing others relieves your constant, grinding dread, even if only for a moment, it will be tempting. But there’s a problem with that way of being, apart from its meanness and craven pettiness: it makes you less able to do your own imaginative work. Competitiveness and the anxiety that stimulates it erodes creativity. It demands your emotional energy, the power you should be channeling into your creative process. And it makes you feel like you have to court public visibility at all costs to protect yourself from others like you. It brings to mind Putin parading around his nukes, saying don’t mess with me. I’m serious business. That’s exhausting. Artists should not have nukes.

This is why I have generally avoided arts communities; though, social media has put most writers like me in a perpetual online detention camp with my peers (and the current surge of AI art paranoia isn’t helping one bit). The pandemic only exacerbated the tensions and forced online interactions that would not have been advisable in any other era. Add the wave of self-conscious, humorless, social-activist writing still moving through pop-culture and the creative life seems nothing but an exercise in misery.

Western, middle-class, social timing says that by certain decades of life, one should have certain things and be certain things. But very few people will admit that they fall short of those ideals. One cannot log onto Twitter or Facebook without seeing some financial marketing come-on that goes, “How many millions will you need to retire?” In other words, how much money will you need to avert an ugly humiliating end after you retire? Millions? Most artists and writers have thousands (or hundreds) in the bank. Some, who are actually very gifted and good at what they do, live below the poverty line.

So I think I understand Jim when he says if you haven’t done a thing by 50, you aren’t going to. He’s not talking to you or me. He’s talking to himself. Because he’s thinking about social timing and emoting like a neurotic artist in a creative community, wondering if he’s destined to die in the gutter.

While I don’t accept the assumptions that go into the success / failure binary encouraged by middle-class social timing—I think it’s a little more complicated and there’s more room to live how you want to live, if you’re willing to make compromises—I also think it’s better to work hard than pump your GoFundMe for sympathy change. But I feel sad when I see a talented colleague desperately cutting down some other poor sap who’s just trying to make the rent any way he can.

We get one life. It isn’t over ’till it’s over. And ultimately we get to do what we want as long as we’re willing to accept the consequences. That means, if you really love being an artist, you’ll choose art. The hard part is making that choice in a relaxed, generous way.

Freelancing Ain’t All Wine and Roses

My recent hiatus from freelance writing culminated in an existential crisis that I now think was actually about money. It’s interesting how money—getting it, keeping it, losing it, worrying about it, hating it, enduring its fraught passage through our lives—often seems to be the underlying rule and mean in situations we first thought were about love or fate or right choices. Life might not always be about money. But lately I’ve had a hard time seeing when it isn’t.

The realization hit me while I was cutting banana trees for my neighbor. Every freelancer encounters dry spells and every dry spell brings angst, a spate of dreadful job applications, and self-imposed austerity measures which help far less than you think they should. In the middle of that, volunteering to prune banana trees should be therapeutic. It some ways, it is.

In others, it only drives the nail of precarity deeper into your skull: what am I doing when I should be looking for a new paying project? What am I doing volunteering for anything? What is my age? What choices have I made that put me here? How much am I to blame? How do I set this worry and anger aside so I can get back on the hustle? Will this petty opportunity cost return as top ramen and hot dogs, holy T-shirts and rent anxiety? Where will I be this time next year? And will I have all the teeth I have now?

These are questions freelancers never want to ask but inevitably do. This is the fear that only those with money have the luxury of being generous. This is how your world gets smaller, how you end up optimizing every moment for work instead of living a life. So I pruned my neighbor’s banana trees with a Ryobi P519 Reciprocating Sawzall in high tropical humidity and tried not to wallow.

Heavy yard work can be good for the soul, especially work that involves razor-sharp power tools. Still, through the whole day, my inner existential calculator-self-critic-time-clock was hard at work dredging up a range of facts, assumptions, and figures that all led to the same thought: kindness is stupid when you’re broke.

Unfortunately, by that reasoning, so is art, writing, music, libraries, museums, public broadcasting, kite flying, junior college, cooking, learning languages, community theater, and any other thing that brings joy and meaning to someone whose emotional life isn’t completely constrained by making a buck. It’s what the ladies’ self-help success guru, Penelope Trunk, used to say when she’d argue that graduate school in the humanities should require a trust fund. In her reductive materialism, culture and self-expression are supposed to come with a price tag like everything else. And if you can’t afford it, well, get back in your cage.

The commodification of kindness and creativity is something I hate as much as anything I’ve ever hated, a set of beliefs about the world that I vehemently reject. Of course, I do. I’m a former English teacher. I have a hard-earned PhD in the subject. I write books. And those skills also feed me as a freelancer, even if the life I lead is a bit like that of a low-stakes professional gambler. Nevertheless, poverty sucks.

I dislike large parts of capitalism, at least, the post-industrial variety carried into my generation by the Boomers. But I do think my fellow Gen-Xers doth protest a bit much. My parents’ post-WWII generation did the best they could and, in many cases, that was pretty great. The people around me, born in the early 1970s, who came of age in the late 80s and early 90s, also did their level best. Put into the widest global perspective for our time, we had it pretty good. And I believe in hard work.

Everyone I knew growing up in lower-middle-class southern California shared that belief and mostly survived. Many of us, especially the arts and humanities types, went into debt and paid an enormous psychological price to do the things we felt called to do. And we seemed to enjoy a much smaller return on those efforts than that of previous generations. But we still shut our mouths and tried to make a living. I guess we’re still trying.

But millennials? Gen-Z? I’m not sure I know what form of life they are. Terms like “self-entitlement,” “performative victimhood,” and “Twitter mob” do come to mind. When I interact with them socially or read about them as a group, I come away feeling like I’ve encountered an undulant mass of mewling, protoplasmic, always-online identity cosplayers.

I know that this is not true and that sweeping generalizations are inherently invalid. And I suspect generations largely aggregate into the same qualities and quantities that have always existed; though, I’d be hard pressed to come up with an earlier analogue for Instagram catgirls, and gig sensitivity readers. These generations are tomorrow’s freelance writers and Uber drivers. And there will be so many more of them.

At the same time, I wonder if people hitting the workforce now, in their 20s and 30s, with crippling debt, a lingering pandemic, and the hottest temperatures in recorded history, have the same inner fallout when they can’t find work. I wonder whether they even want to work the way I have, the way I still work? Do they doubt themselves, even after decades of professional experience? Do the former English majors sometimes reach a point where they swear they’re giving up the thankless writing life (because, let’s face it, the last thing the world needs is another writer) but find themselves coming back to it again and again like an addiction?

I have no doubt that some of them will come around to my way of thinking while cutting banana trees and flirting with heat stroke: maybe what the world needs is not what I need. Maybe a writer’s job is not to be respectable and flush, but to write and avoid getting flushed. Maybe no matter how many trees I prune, I know I’ll be heading back to the writing desk sooner or later, dental plan or not. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then next week. If not next week, then never. Because in this game, there is no victory scenario, no rest, no stopping until they put me in the ground.