The Tragedy of Creatives(Edited)
“ Whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that’s unique. You have the ability to make art.” -Neil Gaiman
These words profoundly impacted me when I read them years ago and ignited a passion for writing, and this time the fire was stronger than ever, but little did I know the journey I was about to embark upon was filled with forts to march, dragons to slay and no princess waiting in the high castle.
As a design student in one of the most prestigious engineering institutes in the nation, I have walked the tightrope between creativity and technicality, experiencing firsthand the unique hardships encountered by those who travel on the creative path. The path is full of uncertainties and blurred horizons, one moment you seem to have figured it all out and the very next all you see is lightyears of darkness.
The path of creatives is deliberately not paved as well as that of our technical counterparts. There are no set rules, no cheat sheet providing the dos and don’ts of the journey, and I call it a journey not a career as a career is more rigid and well thought of and detailed out to the minute detail but you can not apply those formulas when it comes to us.
Planning sometimes feels forbidden in this journey because, in the end, these plans fail first. That does not mean you go all into the battle with a just knife but be flexible with what you have planned. Improvising is a tool that might come in handy here.
A well-planned career in a creative field could have restricted William Blake from writing poems and nobody would have known the magic of Tiger, tiger. Nobody would have known about Leonardo Da Vinci if he had stuck to plans, and who knows your favorite movies would never hit the floor if they had planned it perfectly. In the mid-1940s the introduction of ‘drip paintings’ by Jackson Pollock is the perfect example of how one’s inspiration to go beyond the set defined path and doing a sort of brutality to the pre-conceived notions in any form of art can give rise to a whole new era.
The most iconic scenes from movies are improvised, the best lines of poetry come when on a walk and the sheer randomness of events causes inspiration for good paintings.
Now say, you figured it all out, the perfect balance. A well-planned and well-improvised path, one full of nuances yet filled with old traditional wisdom. But what does it cost to fulfill the legacy of creative minds, and what are the tradeoffs that a creative must bear to see their name on a book, a painting, or an album?
The curse of creativity is not limited to failures, which have more probability of occurring in this field, it manifests in the horizons of success as well. No matter where you go you always lurk behind your shoulder and see a few monsters there.
Be it imposter syndrome or perfectionism, be it the failure to write a good piece or writer’s block we have more demons to fight in real life than John Constantine.
Making art is hard and staying true to yourself while doing that is much harder, you expose a lot more of yourself than your comfort levels, you let strangers examine your beliefs, and you even let them criticize you. You share more than you are willing to and in return, you get less than you expect.
I personally feel a creative endeavor can become more than a career, it can transcend to become an expression of oneself. In the end that’s what it all demands, total expression, nothing else and that’s when things become messy.
It’s hard to express, it’s hard to share how you view the world and it’s a lot harder to tell people how you feel about the world you see every day.
All these things will happen to you if you have luck on your side, and you have to come to terms with this and eventually enjoy it more day after day, word after word. Every style of art comes with its challenges and you have to remember why you started this in the first place.
I am a bit biased towards writing when it comes to creativity, not because I have no respect for other creative endeavors but because I am not good enough to practice them and gain first-hand experience with their creative curse. But I was relieved and honestly happy to know, from my friends, that this curse of creativity is not limited to writing but they face the same dragons every night when the world is far asleep and these minds are busy consuming the creative juice to produce something that has not been seen before.
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
— Scott Adams
What happens in the dark corners of the closed rooms in which these creatives hide their tragedies is still a mystery to the rest of the world. The scars of the past manifest in the form of art, they say.
The tragedy of creativity resides in its uncertainty and this uncertainty comes with the tremendous beauty of creation. The tragedy of creatives is the ultimate poetry that humans crave.
