The artist. A solitary genius. A creator of beauty so sacred that we can’t help but love and fear at the same time.
“He’s a true artist,” we find ourselves saying, and it’s these words put together that conjure up the vision of someone whose inexorable destiny was to create, even at the expense of having to endure a lifetime of humility and frustration and social alienation.
The true artist is often misunderstood. He’s utterly and inconsolably alone with his art. And it is that art, that we all revere, that we’d think of as a bridge, that art is actually a wall. The artist hides behind this wall, refusing to face reality.
But times are changing. The artist has little choice in the matter: he either dies an artist or lives long enough to see himself become a creative entrepreneur.
Kurt Vonnegut, one of the most influential writers of this century, passed down a simple list of rules for writing a short story, though I think they can be applied to longer narratives as well.
He did say that Flannery O’Connor broke all his rules except the first and that great writers tend to do that, but I believe his famous eight rules can provide a skeleton to writing fiction.
And I think that this is what’s really important in art. A foundation. Simply by reading or following rules, or by taking creative writing courses, but it’s also crucial for the artist to make his own decisions. The moment rules start feeling like a cage, you should escape. It’s like strolling through a garden and picking the flowers you like. If you absorb too much or if you simply follow rules (someone else is choosing what flowers you should pick), you’ll never develop a style of your own.
In a world of fixed rules, there’s no room for improvement. Or improvisation. Or evolution.
Some might say the trickiest part is actually selling the book. Or writing it? Opinions differ. But what really sells a book? What marketing tool? What recipe to follow? Is there a recipe?
A lot of people ask me about how to best monetize their blogs.
Do they place ads? Do they try to sell them to their readers directly? Do they sell merchandise?
Well, the truth is this…
You can only monetize the knowledge and experience you have accumulated. Either by creating a digital product, such as an eBook, or by creating an online course.
That’s the future…
And if 2020 taught us anything at all, it’s this: there’s so much more we can do with the technology that is readily available to us.
So, if you’re interested in maybe creating and selling an online course, there’s this super cool (and FREE) virtual event taking place on January 25th.
Plenty of high-profile speakers, including blogging guru Neil Patel.
Amplify 2021 is a free-to-attend virtual summit designed to help you create, launch, and scale your first – or next – online course. Join 15+ top course creation experts for actionable sessions that will empower you to turn your unique expertise into an online course business your community will go wild for.
Amplify 2021 will give you the tools and know-how to:
Create an online course fast, without trading in your valuable time and resources.
Launch and sell a branded online course that compliments your online business strategy.
Earn revenue from an online course, and understand how to scale your course along with your business.
So, if you’re interested in creating a course (or are already selling online courses), this virtual event is worth the time.
I’ve always believed that what makes us want to be creative is consuming a lot of content. The more we feed our brain, the more we get this itch to create something of our own.
But there’s an issue with this. As Ira Glass so eloquently stated, we have developed taste, but we have yet to be good enough to create the type of quality content that we regularly consume.
That’s why I also believe that creatives have to feed their brains with other types of content: the content that teaches one how to be creative, how to develop the proper mindset of a content creator.
That’s why today I’m sharing with you a list of nine must-read books if you want to become a better content creator, whether you’re an artist, a writer, a blogger, or a vlogger.
There’s no doubt about it. Shopify is the undisputed king of online commerce.
Yet, the platform often falls short when it comes to certain features. It’s notoriously counter-intuitive when it comes to selling digital downloads, which is how most creative entrepreneurs choose to monetize their audiences these days.
Also, when it comes to selling memberships, subscriptions, or services, it often falls short.
And even though there are a lot of platforms trying to challenge Shopify’s domination of the online world, most notably WooCommerce and BigCommerce, there are some interesting underdogs that might do the trick if you plan on opening an online store soon.
“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”
― Stephen King
I can’t tell you where to find your muse-guy. It might be a corner-booth in a crowded bar. It might be in your own house, in your own bed, as you struggle to fall asleep.
You might even find your muse in the subway, as you ride home after work.
Stranger things have happened.
I can tell you only that when you find this muse, every civilized instinct in your soul will disappear. You’ll suddenly feel this itch, impulsive as hell, a complete disregard for rules or consequences.
You will want to create something of your own. You will want to do what you can, with whatever’s at your disposal at that moment. Right there, right then. If you have to write your story on a piece of napkin, so be it. If you have to sketch on your phone, fine.
When you find your muse, you will feel yourself becoming addicted to the promise of doing work you hope could last forever.
The goal isn’t to live forever. We all die. We all know that. The goal, however, is to create something so beautiful, almost as beautiful as the things we can imagine, and then hope it’s going to last forever in the hearts and minds of everyone else.
However, it is of utmost importance that you go home. Seriously. Go home and get to work.
When you find your muse, listen to the voice of inspiration. You won’t be able to sleep anyways. You might feel the need to pick up smoking, or some other bad habit. The side-effects of inspiration are often teeth grinding, a loss in appetite, and taking longer than usual showers, so you can brainstorm until the skin on your fingers gets all wrinkled.
“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” — Aristotle
There’s a myth about Michelangelo working on the Sistine Chapel.
One day, someone was watching the Italian artist spend an insane amount of time laboring over a small, hidden corner of the chapel’s ceiling.
Surprised by Michelangelo’s persistence to make that obscure corner as perfect as possible, they asked the artist who would ever know whether it was perfect or not.
Michelangelo replied, “I will.”
Even though the great Renaissance artist considered himself to be a sculptor, and wasn’t a big fan of painting, he did however have a deep love for the act of creation, regardless of the medium.
Another popular myth about Michelangelo is the fact that, even at the age of 82, a master of the arts, he was proud to admit that he was still learning.
The process was his reward. The creative journey interested him, far more than reaching the destination.
In our pursuit of success, we often focus mostly on the end result. Ironically, by doing that, we either neglect the journey because we want to get there as fast as possible or we simply obsess on making the end result as perfect as possible.
Either way, we forget to enjoy the journey, and in effect, we lose our desire to even reach the destination.
In the sixteen years since I wrote my first story, I’ve published five books, thousands of blog posts, and written a billion or so words that I later deleted.
When I first got started, one of my biggest fears was that I’d run out of ideas. I was concerned that I would burn out, that there won’t be any stories or words left in me. This doomsday scenario would play in my brain, over and over again, and for this reason I became a hoarder of… ideas.
Oscar Wilde once said that, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
Writing as an art can’t be taught, and even though Creative Writing courses and workshops undoubtedly help writers grow, writing is a solitary process, and it’s up to each individual to reach within the confines of his mind for answers.
Writers are unique to the extent that even if someone would try to replicate the same career a fellow writer had, he would most likely fail to achieve the same success. A lot of factors come to play in this, including luck, and blindly following a writer’s advice is not the most suitable of actions. What worked for him might not work for you. Instead, you should absorb the rules others have used before you and change them according to your own style and needs.
There are no maps to guide you in this journey. All you get are some folks who are more than happy to help you find your way from time to time.
I think I wrote and published well over a million words by now. Probably even more. Who knows? Who cares?
After all, the blank page that I have to fill right now with words doesn’t care about my previous articles, short stories, or novels. All it cares is that I transform its emptiness into something worth someone’s time.
This is what being creative means: to turn the white page, the blank canvas, the empty document into something by sheer power of will, which is, at times at least, quite a painful process.
And don’t believe anyone who tells you that being creative can be effortless. They are trying to sell you something, whether it’s an e-book or e-course.
Anyways, here are some tips and tricks on being creative. It’s not going to make the process effortless for you, but it’s going to offer you a bit of clarity, which I’ve found to be extremely useful especially when you’d much rather bang your head against your desk than write another word.
In 2009, during an interview, radio host Ira Glass shared rare insights into what it means to be a creative. The kind of insights that are just at the edge of our mind’s peripheral vision; he managed to pull into focus an often overlooked element about the act of creation.
What drives us to create in the first place is not a desire to play god, but rather our hunger for art.
“Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?” — Ira Glass
He later goes on to make his most valuable contribution: the most important thing that you can do as a creative is to produce a huge volume of work until you become good enough to create work of the same quality as the art you consume.
You bridge the gap between the art you produce and the art you admire by producing as much work as possible.
It is true, and this particular insight has become almost myth, being written about over and over again by countless creatives.
Yes, the advice to do more work applies to almost all areas of life, but there’s something that we often take for granted: killer taste is not so easy to develop.
Some might say the trickiest part is actually selling the book. Or writing it? Opinions differ. But what really sells a book? What marketing tool? What recipe to follow? Is there a recipe?
