Tag: fear of failure

Motivation, Part I

When I first joined deviantArt five years ago, I weighed in on a forum regarding the ubiquitous lament of artists: motivation. It's a common refrain I hear, particularly from young artists, that they used to draw all the time and now they go weeks or months without inspiration. They are looking for some thrill, some newness that art used to give them when they were kids, but that kind of excitement can't last in the face of years and decades of doing art. Eventually, it becomes a job. And as with every other job, some people hate that, and some people care enough for the end product that they sail past the day-to-day disappointments.

I can't tell you at this stage in my life where I fall, as I am neither established and comfortable nor young and passionate nor even middlingly motivated. But over two decades of struggling with this angst, I do have a few pointers. And I think I can sum them up for you, under four main categories: Fear, Dissatisfaction, Validation, and Mood. As I learn more, I will try to update these articles.

Fear

One of the biggest barriers in producing art is fear: fear of being a failure, fear of ridicule, fear that you can't repeat past success, fear that you can't give your ideas the attention they deserve. Some of this fear comes early in a career from lack of experience, some comes later from the first glimmers of success, some from at the end when you are settled and have everything to lose. But it's the same destructive inner monologue, and it is never good to hear.

Myself, I hear it everyday, every time I pick up a pencil. And here are some ways I work around it.

Note: most of these are from the perspective of a beginning artist; if I ever move on to professional, I'm sure I'll have some later stages to add.

  1. Practice.

    You can build your confidence, increase your skills, and fill time otherwise spent on angst by engaging in practice work that may not directly further your dreams.

    1. Trace an Artist You Love.

      Practice makes perfect. If you love an artist, they have something you want to learn to do. Copy them until you figure it out. You don't have to spend the rest of your life being a derivative Disney artist - you can master the style and then move on to something even better.

    2. Color a Comic Page Drawn by Someone Else.

      Ink a comic page sketched by someone else. Draw a page scripted by someone else. These are repetitive tasks that make you more comfortable in a particular medium and more familiar with the "language" that you need to learn.

    3. Read The Blog of an Artist You Admire.

      Look for tips, strategies, life lessons. Most artists have blogs these days - in fact, most of them are on deviantArt and you can follow them! They may post works in progress or tutorials or retrospectives - you can learn a lot and see that the end result you so admire is just a series of tricks they've learned from years of experience, which you can apply to your own work with similar success.

    4. Reach Out For Advice.

      Go to comic conventions, send out emails to artists you admire or artists who achieved things you wish you could do. Most people love to talk about themselves and what they've done, and making friends in the community can give you a great support group of encouragement and promotion. I would caution on asking for critiques: make sure a critique is what you want! If you are inspired by criticism and aren't discouraged, by all means ask for it-! But don't do it just because someone told you it's the thing to do. Stick to asking for advice if all you are looking for is conversation and support.

  2. Stop Making Fun of Other People.

    A friend sent me some poetry once and I was not very nice about it. Not only did I probably crush this person, I additionally made it that much harder for my own poetry to ever be good enough, for myself. Stop criticizing other people for doing bad work or taking stupid risks. Everywhere in your life: movies, television, fashion, dating, karaoke. Realize that everyone looks stupid on the way to achieving something amazing. When you start making allowances for the ridiculous failings of others, you will be less afraid of your own.

  3. Deliberately Humiliate Yourself.

    Take an awful picture you've done and post it online. Post some awful fanfic or poetry from your teenage years. Seriously, what's the worst thing that could happen? Face it and realize it's not that bad.

  4. Finally, Jump in.

    Get your feet wet doing what you want to do. You won't be perfect, but we learn by doing. Eventually you just have to give it a go.

    1. Start With Baby Steps.

      If you want to write a comic, try writing a 4-page sample short. If you want to paint, do a small version of a big painting, or a rough version of something complicated you have in mind.

    2. Lie to Yourself.

      Tell yourself you are just going to do something "for practice." If you completely fail, who cares? You don't have to show it to anyone. You will just try it out.

    3. Get Out There.

      Even if it's not perfect. Every week. It takes a long time to build up an audience. Decades. Get out there now - even if you aren't happy with your work yet - and start recruiting your future fans. We'll talk about this stage more, but frankly, you may never be happy with your work. But if you never share it, then you will forever be a hobbyist closet artist, and miserable. Just put aside your ego and post your successes and failings for the world to mock and/or praise.

    4. Ignore The Naysayer.

      Seriously - forever! A lot of this section has been about busywork - exercises to help you get past your fear. But the end result is that you need to accept that you feel this way, that you will ALWAYS feel this way, and you just need to work past it. Sometimes you are right to be afraid, and there are things you can do to improve. And sometimes it is just holding you back from doing something great. So stop listening to the fear and just work!

Next up? Dissatisfaction. Sometimes you just hate EVERYTHING you do.

Posted 2011.03.01 22:11 | Last modified 2011.03.08 8:59 | 11 Comments

Book Review: The Line Between

[The Line Between]
The Last Unicorn is one of my Favorite Books, but Beagle's other works haven't really struck a similar chord in me, until the final tale in this collection of short stories: "A Dance for Emilia." I was quite literally crying my way through the whole thing. Jake is a second-rate actor who spends his life working small theaters and bit parts; his friend Sam is a dancer who gave it up when he realized he would never be good enough, and became a theater critic instead (he refuses to review dance, noting that he's too bitter). There's no judgement (or at least none that I sensed) between these two choices. But the unspoken grief Sam feels over this choice haunts the entire narrative, up against Jake's lesser sadness of mediocrity.

I heard some reality show girl on one of the lesser cable channels chattering childish epiphanies during a channel-hop yesterday. She said that if you loved something enough, that was all it took to succeed. And I laughed, with all the bitterness of poor Sam. It's not, else the world would be full to the brim with artists and musicians and writers. Instead we fall to supporting roles, like critics, teachers, assistants, and gallery buyers, or disappear entirely into other, less-creative, endeavors. Reading that story, I side with Jake. Better to be a forgotten nobody in the world you love, than standing on the sidelines, forever thinking about what you gave up.
Posted 2009.08.10 11:26 | Last modified 2011.03.02 13:37 | 1 Comment

In Fear of Dying in Little Parts

I am not the person I imagined.
A silly thought, after countless compromises.
Haven't we all made them, just to live?
But still tragic, for a person dead and never breathed.
The grand fantasies of children, that sense that someday
We still have time to be the whole we dreamed inside.
Is that the line we walk across, between young and old,
Quick and cold, when we stop thinking what we'll be
And wondering where we lost our way?  Backtracking,
Like age is a map we could retrace.
The poets dying young are fleeing disappointment,
But in what? Their arts, their hearts, or faces?
The fading ambition of youth
Or the looming inertia of old age?
Forever mourning rosy-colored photos in the past
While hiding from the ever-changing leaves
Of tomorrows falling all around.
Are wrinkled forms and wrinkled souls entwined for all,
Mind and body locked and marching on to frailty,
Till every part we call ourselves betrays us?
They told me it crept silently into our faces
In little changes never noticed till too late,
But instead it runs in fits and starts:
My eyes, my mouth, my neck, fingers trembling unasked.
I'm afraid of what comes next.  I could accept
A withered trunk if still my leaves grew green.
But everything and all of me
Fading in a murky bog
Of muddled, mumbling, sentimental Old Woman -
That I can't forgive the threatening tick-tick-tick.
A silly thought - aren't they all silly now?
Pretending that my hopes and dreams are somehow separate
From the worn-down beating of my heart and the sticky blood inside it.
They will all die together, why not tire and slow as one?
And in the end, I probably won't know, forgetting and forgettable.
One day I'll be Her, and that's that, and maybe I won't cry,
The way my mother did last year, remembering,
The way her mother did, decades past, when I drew her last.
A curse they handed down, unwilling, to their daughters
With all the other mixed gifts of resemblance.
And so the poets stop, right here - maybe even now too late.
But me, I'm nobody, so I keep going: waiting, fearing, hiding
From the fits and starts, come to take the rest away.

Posted 2009.02.22 11:40 | Last modified 2009.02.22 11:40 | Leave a reply

Messages From My Subconscious

I often feel like my dreams are trying to tell me something. Not ominous messages from the deep unknown or anything so mystical, but simply insights from my subconscious mind. I'll have arguments over religion, lose my job, find out a loved one has died... little, emotional pushes to prepare me for inevitable future events. And this morning I had one of those dreams, perhaps inspired by this recent sketch. In my dream I was walking through an unfamiliar and lavish apartment, filled with sketchbooks and unfinished paintings. And I understood that these pieces were all mine from many years ago, but all I could think as I looked at them was "I could never paint that." I became very frustrated flipping through half-finished works, each grander and more ambitious than the last. And I knew I could never finish them and I kept thinking, "How did I ever start this?" I woke up depressed. I often say this to myself, that I was a better painter 15 years ago than I am now. That I was a more creative artist. No one agrees with me - I think this is just one of my own particular angsts.

[Regency London]
And it wasn't until a half an hour later that I finally understood what the real message was. I was thinking of the last painting I had looked at in my dream: an 1820s table surrounded by laughing guests, each person based on myself and horrible people I once knew (the frivolous and petty upper class of Regency London being an astute visualization of the villains of my own social past). And it abruptly occurred to me that I *could* paint it, if I wanted to. It would just require a lot more time and preparation than I'm accustomed to.

It was in that lucid moment that I realized that I am constantly sabotaging myself with inhibitions. I never try anything too big or too ambitious. A mental block far below even my conscious thought process just crosses those ideas out and says: "No, that's too hard for me." In drawing my comic I have often found myself forced to draw things because the story calls for it - difficult angles, buildings, trees, cars (*shudder*). And I do it because I have to. And it's painful and I fail a lot. But in the end I do it anyway.

And that's what's different between the artist I am now and the one I was when I was younger and couldn't draw worth crap. I never told myself no. I think that's a pretty damn brilliant insight. Way to go, subconscious. You deserve a cake.
Posted 2008.09.26 10:24 | Last modified 2011.03.02 13:42 | 2 Comments

Unfinished

Were I more clever I would be the clown, were I more stupid I would be the fool, were I less light-hearted I would be the tragic victim, were I more sociable, I would be the lady faire. Alas, fighting against stereotypes while simultaneously trying to define myself with shallow paradigms, I don't think I am anything easily stated, except, perhaps, too much like everybody else.

My life is fairly ordinary, the average nine-to-five job that drives people to load up a pair of shotguns in the trunk, just to bring a little variety back into their world. But I don't, in fact, hate my job. And I know my own character well enough that I can't see myself creating Michaelangelo's David during a six-month artistic leave of absence. I'd just sit on my ass watching TV like everybody else does. So I haven't run out to buy that gun permit yet. And I don't think a 10-foot slab of marble would really fit in the trunk of my teeny little Toyota, provided it had the horsepower to lug such a thing home.

People still tell me that I am exceptional and talented and all those fancy other words you use when you meet someone whose minor daily achievements you envy simply because you're feeling suddenly guilty that you spent the last month on your ass watching TV. I hear it a lot less than I did when I was a straight-A high school student with red hair and glasses and an inferiority complex the size of Pocatello. It could be that I've shed the glasses, and my hair is now blue, but I suspect rather the general apathy that descends on your average artistically-minded teenager forced to abandon creative pursuits and instead excel in math, science, and literature in the vain pursuit of identity, approval, and an easily stated path in a decidedly complex world. Then again, perhaps the very fact that I could construct that sentence (and recite it theatrically to anyone who asks) is enough to alter previously genial public opinion from genius to simple psycho.

Like most people, I tend to blame my past for my present failures. It's not really fair: after all, it's not like anyone made me join the cheerleading squad or the drama club. In fact, I was basically raised *in absentia*, so if I took up the misguided notion that getting an A in chemistry would make my father notice I existed, well, that was my own stupidity. Hence the opening, and why I'm not the clown, although I do still dream occasionally of becoming a stand-up comedian. I have a routine: but since I never joined the drama club, I don't think I could overcome the stage-fright.

But let's not forget the conclusion of my key sentence. The easy path. I never fought enough for what I wanted. I still don't. I still sit on my ass watching TV week after week, dreaming of painting while groggily absorbing another rerun of ER. Like imagining the emptiness that lies beyond the edge of our universe and trying to conceive of how far it does or does not stretch, life can seem an intimidating void. Any marker in that void, any approved path or witnessed career, is a hard lure to ignore, especially when up against the uncertainty of personal vision, the ties that must be cut to follow one's dreams, and the bickering back-seat driver that is my own low self esteem.

Besides, a person can find a lot of company on that easy path. A wealth of salesmen and business executives cross my path, their careers made by two years of selling Mormon religion. Young mothers with prematurely large families conceived with the same in-depth planning that attends a customer big-sizing their fast food meal. People whose lives were made by indecision, and when it occurs to them finally to be dissatisfied where they end up, they drift on as lottery junkies and mystical dreamers, patiently waiting for some cosmic hand to capriciously pluck them from their dull, directionless lives and set them in their proper paradise. I sometimes feel like the prankster yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre, watching the crowds pour past me, running from that moment of deciding their life's future course. But it must have been someone else, because when graduation day came, I ran with all the rest of them.

And there must be a million different moments behind me when I had the chance to follow my heart, from selecting my college major to how I spent the 15 minutes this morning between showering and breakfast. There will likely be a million more. Myself, I'd like to think that somewhere down this road I will select one, finally. That I will look down into that void and back at the road, and maybe--just that once--think that uncertainty could be more satisfying than another hour of network television. It does help that the quality of the latter deteriorates year after year. Maybe I could graph that: the decline in interesting programming versus the effort it takes to do something which requires the use of my limbs. There might be a point in there where they equalize. It would be nice to know when, especially since that would help me plan my La-Z Boy payment plan.

I do have some genuinely brilliant friends: PhDs in music and history, top-notch lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, VPs. I think I must be that fat girl in our group, the one the cheerleaders always kept around in high school. But however closely I study them, my little troop of Bright Eyes have yet to reveal their secret key to breaking the couch potato cycle. And they aren't exactly the disciplined type, forgoing television or eating extra bran. The things they go without are fairly universal: love, cleanliness, a healthy diet, physical activity of any sort. The ways they piss away their days are not so different from my own: beer, pizza, computer games, hypochondrism. Yet at the end of the year, my friends show up with photography awards, new degrees, and job offers from all over the world. And I was rejected by McDonald's.

I wonder sometimes what opportunites they hate themselves for missing, what dreams fill their rosy-colored futures. Is there a level up there I can't see, stuck all the way down in my dead-end lower middle class world as I am? The material one of mansions and antique cars which lures the lottery junkies is one I think none of my crowd is really drawn to, but perhaps there is some other life intertwined, good food, fine wine, gallery shows, witty conversation, a chance meeting with Steve Martin or Geena Davis at the annual MENSA gathering (and finding your IQ is higher--oh, one can dream). Because somewhere in my bitter soul I think no one is ever quite ready to sit down and say, "Yup, my life is perfect, just the way it is."

It's supposed to drive us to achieve, that shrewish dissatisfaction with our lives. Maybe it works for other people: suburbanities desperately laboring for a bigger car and smaller ass than the other lemmings of the herd. I'm not much of a herd creature, unfortunately. However long I agonizingly relive my past and rescript every line like a bitter and talentless old film critic, I'm still living a life so lacking in worth that it would fall somewhere below Strom Thurmond: The Prenatal Years.

I find myself hating middle-aged housewives searching for importance at the art stores I mournfully frequent. I watch them tensely from the corner of my eye as I wander those narrow aisles, hand stretched out to brush over each color without ever quite touching. I'm afraid to buy anything, afraid of committing my meager income to a frivolity I may never summon the courage to actually use. But these greying women blissfully fill carts with second-rate pastels and teach-yourself kits, already dreaming of their first gallery showing.

Outside, men in dark suits stride purposefully down the streets like emergency room doctors to their inconsequential lunches, immaculate gangs of future corporate businessmen, in training to rob pensions and crush blue-collar lives. The tidily dressed maids of the expensive hotels follow with less pomp, but they match so well it's hard to separate the two, like dancers at some grand waltz in fancy dress. I haven't decided if I am just the little girl left outside, or perhaps the main course, stewing quietly in the corner.

I'm not fooled by the lower class, wondering about their wasted potential and unnoticed misfortunes. It's a frivolity for well-off college kids looking for griefs in others because they don't have enough of their own yet. There are no Shakespeares out there, no Berninis-in-disguise, bumming cigarettes on the street corner. I imagine we could all be Mozarts, set on the right path and pushed along until we can't turn back. But how many of us can make it there on our own? I don't know if anyone can or ever did achieve *that* act of genius. We all have our little fortunes that others envy, the little presents from fate that often go unnoticed, but carry us through hurdles others can never surmount. In the end, any artist is rated on his life's work, not his potential. Wasn't that Solon's axiom, after all?

In fact, a lack of opportunity is at times the gift from fate that creates the genius which I seem to lack. I don't mean to be fickle, rejecting my own talents because they weren't the ones I wanted, like some pouty birthday girl wishing for one Barbie over another. But I can't help but wonder that if I had been less skilled at writing, if I had shown less interest in math, less passion for music, if I had perhaps shown a general failing in all other categories, if that might not have been the gift I needed to make me pursue art with more determination. If maybe all those other artists out there, working and selling and drinking martinis with self-deprecating wit at their first big exhibition, are simply so much better than me because they are, in fact, not better than me, but simply not good enough at anything else to be distracted. I do what I must to pay the bills, and if I had been unable to make the money so much more easily by playing at a computer, perhaps I might have had to work a little harder, eaten a little less, lived a little more squalidly, as the desperate, hungry artist that I still have the outright middle-class gall to envy while I drink my moderately priced French wine and watch my latest DVD.

And it always comes back to the television, doesn't it? That time-waster, that mind-sucking, creativity-destroying, social-skills-eroding void of cheap entertainment. Everyone likes to blame the TV for our modern apathy. And in a sense it does shut off the mind, presenting us with a ready-made story which we only have to sit back and passively enjoy. Kind of like reading. Like music. Like art. It seems humanity has filled the world with media to distract us from the much-less enjoyable real world we only stay in long enough to bring home a paycheck.

Like Dorothy, we live in a world of grays, depressing, boring, where we are nothing more than one of six billion: easily replaced, completely common. But I think we desperately want that world of color, that perfect fairy tale, where we are the main character and whatever happens, good or bad, happens because we wanted it so. In the real world, all of our choices seem to have bad endings, and most of what happens is outside our control anyway. We face downsizing, divorce, financial ruin, unwanted families, bickering and demanding relatives, finger-pointing coworkers, a wildly careening economy and an electoral college which simply validates our insignificance on the planet. I don't think I need to be Cinderella to be happy, with my own personal fairy concierge, but even the Wicked Stepsisters had a choice in how their story ended.

So we invent Santa Clause and aliens and tarot cards and the whims of God, just to bring some sense, some magic back into our lives. Just so we can close our eyes and imagine that we will be OK, that the world will stop spinning around us and we won't grow old and die, we won't be homeless tomorrow so our CEO can go to Hawaii for Christmas, we won't be alone and scared as we stare down that dark and uncertain future, which we may share with six billion other humans, but which we still have to trod all by ourselves. The middle-class housewife closes her eyes and dreams of a world where she is the center of attention, talented and beautiful and beloved. The businessman dreams of the corner office where he directs the company, and instead of being the victim of layoffs, he goes to Hawaii and drives the luxury car in his Armani suits. The maid dreams of saving enough money to send her daughter to college, of spoiling her grandchildren and retiring comfortably to Florida. The perfect fairy tales, and perhaps I was too harsh in condemning them. At least they are dreaming.

Art was my dreaming. My own little bit of magic, captured on paper to be held as close as a cyncial atheist, a girl who loathes society and often herself, as close as I could ever get to those dreams. And yet I walk my dreamless path instead, afraid, I guess, to let my own magic be exposed to the gray light of day, to be unmasked and declared a fraud. As long as I hide it, it will be my own fairy tale, the dream of my dreams. And every moment is a little more gray, and a little more hopeful at once, as I walk that line between grasping it and losing it. One morning the suspense will be too much for me, one morning I'll have to give in, have to give it a try, just to see if the reality might be as wonderful as the dream.

But right now, I think I'll go watch TV.

copyright 2003 mleiv, any reproduction or distribution expressly prohibited

Posted 2003.12.06 12:00 | Last modified 2003.12.06 12:00 | Leave a reply

Julian Needs A Job

Posted 2003.06.01 12:00 | Last modified 2011.10.05 20:00 | 3 Comments

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