Earlier this week I shared advice Ira Glass gave to beginning storytellers.
Here’s a follow up from my Brooklyn pal, Amanda Hirsch, who wrote a tongue-in-cheek 10-step plan to being an artist.
Refuse to do the work. Avoid it at all costs. If you want to write, you should instead check Twitter and Facebook. If you want to play music, instead play video games and smoke pot. Wanna be a comedian? Drink. Painter? Drink. Poet? Really drink.
It calls for surrounding yourself for people who discourage you, assuming you must be unhappy to be an artist, thinking about art and consuming other people’s but not actually making your own — then hating your job, yourself and art.
It is not a mistake that Amanda’s insightful critique of procrastination and self loathing in creatives is also laugh-out-loud funny. She’s a long-time improv comedian who’s now working on sketch comedy — she knows funny and she knows all the ways creatives drive themselves bonkers.
Maybe it’s because we convince ourselves we must wait until the exact moment when the muse lands on our shoulders to deliver the spark of genius. Maybe it’s because we all harbor that doubt that what we’re doing isn’t very good, so why are we wasting our time anyway? Maybe it’s because sneaking one more peek at our high school boyfriend’s Facebook profile is way more interesting than whatever project in front of us.
Yes, I referred to our collective high school boyfriend. Aren’t we all in this together?
Don’t take my word for it. Read Amanda’s 10 steps to being an artist — but not just as another way to procrastinate, OK?
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