On sharing creative work in the age of *content*
When has overthinking ever been good to anyone?
I meet so many talented people all the time. The other week I was at a literary magazine launch and sat next to a young woman in the audience. She was bright and bubbly and her head was full of thoughts. Currently a student, she said she dabbles in writing. So I asked her if there was anything of hers that I could read. She said no, not at the moment. I figured that she was too shy to share.
It's a classic dilemma; you want to break into something, but you’re also terrified of what other people with more experience than you may think. That may not have been her reasoning, of course, but what a shame when no one gets to experience art intended to be shared! Taking your time on things is important; quality filters are always welcome in the age of content saturation and pure delusion – but there's also the issue of taking too much time with creative projects and overthinking them to the point where things get buried.
I've found that writing, like any creative endeavour, is a delicate balance of recognising when a project needs more work and when it's ready for the world. I'm a bit luckier with my journalism work because I have to work to set deadlines. It doesn't matter how precious I might feel over something; a person is waiting on me on the other side. This dynamic helps me detach from insane expectations of what my work should be and trust that working in collaboration with another human will mean that whatever I've done won't be trash.
Starting anything is scary; it's a leap of faith, especially if your life has been full of rejections. But it's necessary to move forward, no matter how slowly. I tell myself this whenever I tie myself up in knots over what other people will think about my ideas or desire to work with them.
In Zadie Smith's foreword of 'Feel Free', she writes: "I think the anxiety comes from knowing I have no real qualifications to write as I do. Not a philosopher or sociologist, not a real professor of literature or film, not a political scientist, professional music critic or trained journalist... My evidence – such as it is – is almost always intimate. I feel this – do you? I'm stuck by this thought – are you? Essays about one person's affective experience have, by their very nature, not a leg to stand on. All they have is their freedom."
I’ve had similar worries. I’m often paranoid that I can’t write on politics because I don’t have a political science diploma or that I shouldn’t publish personal essays because they may appear navel-gazing. There’s also the fear that because almost everything on the internet has become consumable content with a deeper agenda to sell people products, injecting more “content” into the universe is pointless and will only add to the noise. Again, good to have a degree of self-awareness, but ultimately, if fear of embarrassment or social failure stopped creative people from sharing their inner world, some of the greatest works of music, art and literature may not have been made.
Not to say that everything we create will be the greatest work ever. The majority of it will be very mediocre, but investing time in the process bears more fruit than doing nothing at all.
P.S. Folks, I know it’s been a while, and I’m sorry not to be writing this newsletter regularly. I hope to get it together a bit more and create a stricter schedule within my work week, but everything has been a lot, especially with my departure from gal-dem magazine and now needing to find a new stable part-time gig. The state of digital media is killing my people! Solidarity to anyone who has found themselves to be in a similar position.
Stuff I’ve written recently
Not doing as much public-facing work at the minute, but this is what I’ve written in the past few weeks:
DAZED - The rise of the deinfluencer
Novara Media - How Conspiracy Theorists Made Air Pollution the Latest Front in the Culture War
Huck Magazine - Why living 15 minutes from everything is actually good
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I always envisioned The Freelance Fraud as a resource that can live through time and space and only be updated infrequently, so at some point soon, I hope to finish writing it! If you want more regularity — I’d suggest subscribing to me on there.
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This newsletter will always be free, and I’m grateful that many of you have found it useful over the years. A few people have asked how you could say thanks or donate a bit of money, so I set up a page where you could do exactly that.
If you want to say thanks, I’d be delighted if you could buy me a digital coffee! But also absolutely zero pressure in this day and age.