IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

It’s fairly self evident, like one of those little cards on a new broom you plan to buy, that shows you how to use a broom, but it bears addressing anyway. We’re in a hyper narcissistic time, and more and more creators, writers, and artists are having to pick up the slack publishers are leaving behind when it comes to making their books or projects succeed. Self promotion via social media is becoming an essential pathway to that success, and it becomes a crucible of egomaniacal confusion, both outward and inward… there is however a way to navigate it, keep to the North Star so to speak and it’s advice I got early and have found only becomes more and more relevant as I get on in my career. It’s super easy: Make it about the Work. Don’t make it about you. The mirror can be a seductive thing and it’s easy to confuse what you make with what you make of yourself. They aren’t the same thing and really never should be. It’s the lighthouse that guides you through the fog of ego mash that’s all around us now, the natural tendency of creatives to adore their own work, and rightfully feel good from its successes. It is how you make the most out of an editorial experience, handle online trolls, critical reviews and that weird side comment your Aunt Clara made at Thanksgiving dinner last year that you still can’t seem to get out of your head. It’s sort of the same rule you apply to parenting overall, if you’re doing it right: You crafted them, but you didn’t create them. They aren’t yours and it isn’t about you. You’re a steward not an owner. So below, we’ll tick through our tried and true Muddy Colors thing we all love most… Lists! Making it about the work, is essential because…

IT HELPS YOU PROCESS THE EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE 

If you’re are fortunate enough to get published, and even more gifted with getting to repeat the process twice or a hundred times over the course of your career, this is a key cause to learn this lesson soon, and also the best possible sandbox to practice it in. Edits, hard ones especially can really sting. I work for a lot of colleagues and now friends that I love, adore and deeply admire professionally, and have felt the strangling rage and pain when a note comes in about something I need to work on in a piece or a story that either pushes against my intentions, or shames me for a secret weakness I hoped they didn’t notice. It’s all just feelings. Nothing wrong with feelings, in fact I’m a huge fan of them. It’s more about how you process this kind of natural and really essential part of publishing or presenting your work. I learned early on, that I was incapable of first blush emotional responses to bad news from the Editor or Art Director, so I adopted a wait-a-day kind of pause to let the emotions cool down. Really it was literally deciding to sleep on it and let the clear approach from the light of the next day have a turn first. It’s saved me from saying stupid shit I’d regret later, pissing off a colleague and working partner who is just trying to make it better, and most importantly missing the opportunity to make the Work improved. After a while that gets better and better and while I can still get pretty worked up, I can now get over it in a few minutes. Worst case, if not, then let the pillow at bedtime soak away the emotions, and read it again in the morning.

If it’s about you it hurts in different ways. Your anger or desire to fight back is tainted and frankly inappropriate to the goal. Assume that your editor is being professional- they almost always are, (not always… but we’ll get into that next) – and compartmentalize how you feel about the Work, from being able to observe the work from a distance. This is not an easy thing for the creator of the work to disentangle their love for it from the stoic analytical requirements of seeing it without attachment so you can improve it from a place of perspective. If it’s not about YOU, but about the WORK, the edits, no matter how stinging, will land very differently. You might even find it a kind of exciting moment of creation. Of solving the problem in a way you’d never considered. A crises met with a clear head is an opportunity for growth.

IT PROMOTES A HEALTHY CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP

I’ve been gifted to have worked with some of the most brilliant storytellers I’ve ever met, and the ones that always went the smoothest, always without fail, were the ones where, no matter how we may have matched personality wise or whatever, if I kept it about the work, 90% of the conflict evaporated. 100% in most cases. Creative partnerships are like mini marriages and as such of course you can’t keep the whole thing afloat on your own. I worked with a guy for a few years that simply could not disentangle his personal feelings from his work and it made it impossible to create together after a while. It’s a two way street and requires both sides to be flowing at their best to be the best experiences. It’s impossible to be completely honest and frank all the time, even with your closest creative partner. We lie to each other all the time… “yes that hat makes you look cool”, “No I don’t think you’re ideas about licorice are disturbing”, etc… No need to be tyrannical about it in areas that don’t actually matter. But when it comes to the Work, there can be no greater value than a creative partner or a colleague you can stand naked in front of and get their unfiltered and honest feedback of the work you’re making – even if it’s not a project he or she is also working on. Better at times to have that partnership experience and later have that partner as a resource for a separate effort. They can be even less involved in the right ways and be more able to give you a clear and clean look at what you’re doing. I always get the best work out of these relationships, and a surprise joy is when your creative partner’s ideas can change, enable, or alter the piece so much that it renders your original and certainly brilliant idea, moot and failing. It makes the project a shared creation and guess what? Less about YOU. There’s a great unburdening to this I cannot describe. It’s two of you sinking or skyrocketing together. Maybe that’s enough on its own.

As I mentioned above, always assume your editor/AD is working in their true professional capacity to start out with. They deserve it by the nature of their actual station at the very least, but it gives you the opportunity to decouple from your work from a place of trust, and that is always a good thing. You can of course be wrong about them, which I have been, or see them fail to keep their personal inputs aside from their notes. Also something that happens a lot, more so than not – we’re all human after all. I’ve had editors that came in hot from a fundamentally different place on a project, operate from their own desire to exercise control or power, offset a sublimated desire to be a writer/artist themselves, and these are rough parings to untangle from. Making it about the work makes it easier. It helps you spot it sooner – I had an editor once come in a project that heavily relied upon living doll people, even featuring one of them as a main character, say in the initiating email “I don’t like dolls, no one does, and the kids who will read this book will hate them too – let’s cut all this”. My first response was of course feeling heartstabbed, but soon I realized, none of this applies here. It’s all personal and his own POV and not at all of the Work that’s sitting before him. It’s his agenda, not the stories. Fail – scratch and move on. You can choose to ignore these notes – my first recommendation, or you can confront them. It’s your book, and even when it’s not about You, it is still your job to advocate for the Work on its behalf. I’ve had an editor come in with some really eye opening notes that helped make the book miles better, and then also insert a note that was basically “I hate freckles. I had them as a kid, and I hated them and I just can’t stand to see freckles so get rid of those.” I decided to ignore it and take the fruits that were fresh from the list of notes and ignore the ones that were, well, not fresh. Making it about the work made that easy. Even though these same notes continued to show up as I turned in pages, “Still see freckles here…”, “lose the freckles on page 29”, ignoring them entirely made them eventually vanish.

IT KEEPS YOU FRESH

This is for the old timers out there, and I guess by old timers I mean anyone older than thirty. YES, we have things we simply prefer to do, I am a portrait guy and so you see a lot of portrait work from me across all the mediums. Some people are dragon people, or horror folk, or have a thing for faeries and others for World War 2. We all have our creative kinks and I say hug those like you feel you want to without shame. BUT, as much as I am encouraging a little self indulgence, I remain preaching the gospel of making it about the Work. Portraits don’t always apply to the Work’s needs, so I need to be able to look past my crutches and see further down the world I’m walking to. It’s fine and dandy to be the finest dragon artist of them all, and if you can somehow get away with a lifelong career just doing that, I salute you. I haven’t met you ever, but I do salute the impossible victory in that. In the real world, there will be times, most of them as the thing of the month ebbs and flows, where say Dragons are out and off the map for most people. Or cowboys or Kaijus, ninjas or Strawberry Shortcake. There will be a time when Harry Potter loses its hold on the market, or when no one can stand to see another zombie without out wanting to eat your own coffee table out of exhaustion. Seeing your work, its vulnerability as a one legged table, is how you navigate these switches in things. Making it about the Work and not you will keep you open to likely finding another genre or subject that excites those damned dragons might have been obscuring from you. It keeps you frosty, attentive, and fresh and these are all the qualities young artists have as a natural reflex, older artists tend to lose. It’s a muscle and it needs to be worked, and it’s usually self comfort, fear, self satisfaction, or self indulgence that atrophies this creative muscle in your art. Exercise young so it becomes part of how you think, and never stop working it. No one want’s to draw the same zombie for thirty or forty years, and neither do you.

IT KEEPS YOU FROM MISTAKING FAME FOR A GOAL

One of the great errors of the internet age is the confusion between fame and success. Put simply if a cat that can’t ever seem to stop vomiting can garner 150k Instagram followers, and you who spend years on years carving a gorgeous sculpture can barely muster 400… that particular metric for qualitative value actually isn’t one. (Full disclosure I’m a follower of three vomit cat feeds and I love them all more than I should). We’ve been in a fame addicted culture for decades now. TV, movies and the internet have hyper fueled it to the point where you can now be hugely successful; at being famous for no other reason than somehow becoming famous. We’re all having to deal with it, and yes that sensation that it feels like a highschool popularity contest writ universal you have… trust that feeling. The differences between a red carpet flashcube walk and the popular boy wearing those trendy pants to a 12th grade dance are exactly the same thing… except one uses itself for marketing campaigns and the other for getting lucky at prom. Both are fine as far as that goes- no one’s actually dying or being harmed obviously. But it’s empty isn’t it, lacking in anything past the initial blush of attention? Fame is not a goal nor should it ever be to lead a happy life, and frankly if you’ve seen fame up close or been fame adjacent as I have been these last few years… let me tell you it’s not something I would wish on anyone. The big reason fame is a garbage goal to chase is because it is entirely a thing about YOU. It literally is the opposite of what I’m hoping to celebrate here. The rewards for keeping this shunted as much as you can, means if you are a creative person who enjoys making the work, you get much more time to do that. You also don’t get time locked to a particular period, because it’s really hard to be Ralph Nagel now and for anyone to care, as a simple among all too many possible examples. Fame invites intrusions and opinions from strangers on a scale that is often overwhelming. It is a goal that leaves faster than it arrives and is as addictive as the finest vintage heroin for the ego you will ever find. If you make it about the Work, try and stay away from making it about making you feel seen or loved or dear god in heaven, popular like that cheerleader in junior high, you will work more, be happier, and feel more fulfilled than a thousand unknowable people cheering you could ever fill. It makes the quiet moments of your life, of which there will be many, opportunities rather than empty periods between famegasms. Just try not to care. Don’t seek it, don’t value it. Making it about the work will endear you less to a fame hungry public, but will endear you tremendously to the principles and gatekeepers that help publish or present the Work. It’s those people that gift you with a career, where fame only at best buys you a moment. Yes the marketing people want those Instagram followers, and for you to be a celebrity. It makes their jobs easier to sell the work on those terms than to have to market it on the basis of the Work itself. As the talent, it’s simply not your cattle, not your field. In fact you might find yourself having to fight the marketing people’s desire for this kind of approach.

I’m not saying be a rude naysayer unwilling to participate in the publicity process at all. If it serves the work then it’s likely okay. It’s part of your job as the work’s ambassador and advocate. Doing a big press event or a widely dispersed campaign, a book tour, or a social media push is more and more essential now than it ever has been. There’s just so much dang good work out there, and so much of the bad that it’s essential to breaking through that noise and being seen. Stand tall and proud of the Work, and let IT become famous. You don’t need to be the face of it if the Work has the reach and pull it should have. A lot of regular people out there need to be convinced to give it a try, and this is where you do that. Especially if it’s a new idea or type of thing. You can run this game without becoming subsumed by it or twisted into pretzels by confusing the attention for personal adoration. If you don’t do this, and confuse who is the horse and who is the rider… you stop making the Work from its natural place of invention, and you start serving the needs of an audience you used to lead but now follow. Having your Mom finally respect what you do for a living because she saw it on The Tonight Show is not a victory. No qualified victories really are, let’s be honest. Ride that marketing horse only as often as you need to, and then dismount with all due haste. Rinse and repeat. Keeping it about the Work helps the younger generation see you as an example of how to work, and again it absolutely endears you to your enablers, editors, ADs, and publishers. Most of them are in this for the Work too, and it makes them like working with you more than having to suffer an insufferable and inflated ego too.

IT HELPS YOU SURVIVE SOCIAL MEDIA

Look, social media is often like seeking a sip of water from a firehose that is also shooting out knives, flowers, and more than the occasional poo pile. It can be rough out there and people can be more terrible online than they would ever dare to be in person. Keeping it about the Work helps temper that poo-storm of angry strangers, or just mean and spiteful strangers… or creepy weird horndog ones, or simply those trolls who just cannot understand how to communicate with other humans properly. Sometimes the issue is simply a cultural clash. In my experience, it’s absolutely true that certain cultures can sound rude as shit when all they are being is themselves or frank. Not all social norms are shared and it’s not fair to take personally what is simply that in play. This is where it not being about you can help you see this and roll with it. The turdbiscuits are another story, but the same principle applies: Keep it about the Work and not about You. SO, that weird dude who wants to see more nips on your Superman drawing can be disregarded for what he is. That person mad that your record release isn’t the one the troll wished was being released and has decided to smear all over your announcement post can be sequestered or dealt with on its own meritless terms… and not cycling around in your brain in bed late that night wondering why you didn’t do what the troll wanted and fussing over how to make him happy, or more likely an example to others be defeating him online. If it’s about the Work, it simply does not matter, and you can get back to focusing on actual important things. There are times where one needs to intervene because some troll is making spurious claims that are starting to take hold. I’ve had to pull the car over because a publisher noticed an emergent spike on a platform keep being sabotaged by a troll and me coming in and refuting it publicly became an essential need to quash it. Again the internet can be a toilet and sometimes, yes, you have to flush it to keep it down. I’m never happy to do have to do this, but I’m always willing when it’s needed because it can harm the Work and I care about the Work. It often stops the bleeding or the tilt towards some ding dong’s conspiracy theory as to why they didn’t get what they wanted, or even in more cases than you might expect, did. Making it about the Work helps you keep your replies from being venomous attacks, soiling yourself in their pigpen. I try to avoid this dynamic wherever possible, but I fail and get caught up in some dumb spiraling internet hate-tornado… and I always regret it, and delete the entire thread and move on anyway. It’s like that old political advice about never wrestling with pigs, because you’ll both get dirty and they love the mud.

And finally…

IT KEEPS YOU LEVEL FOR THE UPS AND DOWNS OF YOPUR CAREER AND LIFE

It’s one of the oldest ideas about keeping not insane throughout the course of your life, from zen koans, to Bob Ross at his easel. If you’re in Hell… it will pass… if you’re in Heaven… this too shall pass. Keep it about the Work does tamp down the exuberance and ego feeding that a grand success can bring, but it also keeps you from falling too far down the despair pit of darkness when the opposite is true. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t revel in your victories or even celebrate them. Feasts after victorious battles are essential to life and I encourage them always. And mourning and upset in failures is part of that too. Keeping it about the Work just keeps both of those wild swings from getting away from you overmuch. It can save you from despair, just ask Vincent Van Gogh. It can keep you from getting lost in the ego fame goblin, just ask Daniel Day Lewis. The gift of the Work is that it unto itself feels nothing. Go yell at that Serrano’s “Piss Christ” for an hour and tell me I’m wrong. The Mona Lisa simply does not give a flying fig how much you admire her. This is a gift of the Work, that it only means something to the viewer and by the act of its viewing. Henry Darger spent his whole life making work no one until he died, and even though Vivian Maier maybe wanted to finally see her photographs become known to the public later in life and never managed to pull it off until after she herself had passed on… she never stopped making her incredible work. We have as artists a personal relationship with our work that supersedes any other kind of relationship.  No one else has the intimate experience with a painting as the painter does. That’s a gift to be the only one who gets to peer into another universe from the administrator window you should never let get spoiled by standing in front of your own vantage. Things are going to go well and they are going to go poorly. If a successful career is also a long one, you’re going to have peaks and valleys. Making it about the work will feed you when you are starving and keep you from drowning when you are swimming in it’s successes. It opens the door to a third way of being that is for most creatives the most elusive: a peaceful sense of gratitude about being an artist. There are projects that landed like a lead balloon and others that get stories high billboards and the applause from the gods, over and over again, both sides. The longer your victories, the weaker your muscles are for handling the flops. It keeps you aware and knowing that sometimes the flops are just a matter of circumstances having nothing to do with you. INDEH for example was a wild success more than our follow up book MEADOWLARK, which I think is more personally valuable to both Ethan and myself. One got the full weight of the marketing machine behind it and the other got a pandemic release. Some of my most favorite work ever made is the work no one seemed to connect to. While making it about the Work doesn’t necessarily soften that sting, it does help me keep pure my love of the piece regardless of it’s outlying success or failure. It’s like loving chocolate ice cream- that others don’t care for it doesn’t affect the flavor. Making it about the Work secures this truth as a fact, and simply makes you happier for it as a person and as a creative.

Simply put, all of this and so much more I didn’t even touch upon, (because let’s face it, this article is long enough already), it makes you better at making the Work. You exist and create in a cleaner space in your head from this, in your actual practice because of this, and helps aid you in the outside world in which you present this work to others. The truth of the matter is this: Art is a private affair with a social requirement. Making sure you keep it about the Work you are crafting and presenting, and stop getting in your own way. You’ll find this practice helps navigate those awkward family Thanksgiving dinners also. Bets possible New Year’s Resolution that you should really try and keep? Make it about the Work in all ways, at all times, every opportunity you get. Trust me you will last longer, be happier and do better for it.