Stamina

Following up on my previous post I want to write a few words on being lonely. Doing creative work, be it poetry, novels, paintings or photography, is a lonely road to follow. You can have admirers, you can have girlfriends supporting you and friends accepting that you’re a little strange, but you don’t have anyone that actually understands what the hell you’re doing.

You’re doing the work because you have to – your mind demands it. You have some vague idea about where you’re going and a diffuse image inside your head of the final product. You’re not doing it because you hope to be discovered and get rich. You would do it anyway – just to get the image out of your head and see it in the open. To be completely honest: You’ll never be discovered by anyone. You are the only one responsible for you being accepted by a public audience! And even when you are, you’ll just get more admirers, but you won’t get a single person that truly understands what motivates your work. You’ll still be lonely – but selling copies

Following your heart on the lonely road of creativity requires a great deal of stamina. Why? Because there’s no end. You’ll never reach the point, where you can sit down and say: ”Phew – I made it. Mission accomplished”. Creativity is a monster. It will carry on, eventually raising the bar, and forcing you to either give up or continue the long walk. Alone.

And then you have to trust yourself. Again!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 9th, 2010 at 9:11 pm. It is filed under Creativity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.