I’ve been reading a bunch of creative self help books, for work and personal curiosity. Emailing lists are apparently the best way to capture an audience, and it’s also a great way to inform someone who actually wants to know about your work. Something like securing your 1000 true fans the right way.
I used to do an email, back in the day. I had time to write it and mull over the different things, then decidedly update everyone about what I was thinking and doing. But now, it feels a bit of a pain to set everything up. Should I do it on Substack or Mailchimp? Maybe I could just create a BCC and work it out from there directly.
Then content wise, what do I write about? And how much can I really capture on my own creative journey? I already feel like I have way too many things to do, and to put another camera up just to catch things happening, maybe that’s a little too much for me.
But then again, it’s the recommended things to do for creatives, to get people involved in your work.
Funny enough, I’ve also been reading about society at large, through the lens of different people. One book is about commodity traders, and how they buy the world. The other is about poverty and sharing finances in any way possible. Yet another as an observation about technological changes and its impact on the world.
So what does an artist do? Or how should a creative behave? To create more and get more eyes on?
I was really stuck at how weird it is to live in the current times, and I wrote about it on Medium. I don’t know what more I can contribute to the world, other than my thoughts and my opinions. It feels silly, because everything has been said already, and if not, said better than what I can say. And yet, we’re advised to put more process out, more content out for more eyes to see.
I don’t know how to feel about that, so I did my Joel thing, and wrote in my journal about how I was stuck, and then decided to write a Medium article about it too. And here I am today, writing about it on my blog.
Maybe the creative self help advice should be to dig and explore as much as we can, until there’s nothing left to uncover. I think that would be more interesting sometimes.
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