Editing a photograph, writing a sonnet, tweaking a line of audio: people make things because they are compelled to recreate the world.
For many people the first— and probably last— reason to make stuff comes down to money. Making things results in stuff to sell, and in a world where food doesn’t just miraculously appear on tables, money matters.
As a concept, this isn’t very interesting to me. It also doesn’t strike me as a good reason to spend one’s brief life often alone, putting words together to construct a novel, or figuring out how to arrange paint or pixels to render an image. The best expressions of creative work certainly can pay well, but most of the time they doesn’t. Most novels sell hardly more than enough copies to fill a box or two, and I challenge you to point to a successful oil painter in your neighborhood. Therefore, there’s got to be some other reason why making things compels people to keep on keeping on.
Sports and traditional business enterprises generally concern matters related to winning. Winning is a huge motivator, sure, but for many creative people winning doesn’t even appear on the list of priorities. Writers labor to organize words because those efforts help construct order out of the uncaring day. Music, painting, photography: creative work bolsters our intimate and eternal desires to wrest measures of influence and control over life. Unlike sports and traditional business which are essentially proxies for controlling others, creative work is about controlling oneself. To faintly echo Robert Frost, that makes all the difference. Considering just how hard it is to make a buck from making a photograph, the collateral reasons for making things have to be substantial enough to motivate someone without hope for making money.
Most of the creative people I know and with whom I like to spend my time pursue their work without assignments. They create because they don’t have a choice. Nobody’s forcing them. They have no choice, because to ignore the impetus pushing them to create is to leave a relentless bathroom faucet dripping in the nighttime of their mind. Musicians know there’s always another another guitar lick to get into their fingers, another set of harmonies to explore. Photographers want to see what happens when they frame their world in a particular way. Poets pursue the right words in the right order to present something that evokes an image as much as it engenders a feeling.
Good luck paying the bills with any of that.
Of course, some artists do pay the bills with their work. They’re often they’re the ones we know about, the ones we follow. As my case in point, you’re reading this blog, which serves as an ostensible mouthpiece to a business enterprise (1AU Global Media, LLC). It’s a business, which means it makes stuff to make money.
But seriously? Are you still reading because your main goal is that you want me to earn a buck? (If yes, thanks for that.) You’re reading because for whatever reason, you’re interested in the narrative. I’m writing because whatever it is that I have to say needs to get out somehow. Sure, money matters, and without a payday, there’s no fuel to keep creative engines running at full capacity. But like most of the artists I care about, acts of creation happen on parallel tracks from the pursuit of paychecks. Like all parallel lines, those motivations may head in the same direction, but they do not require convergence to arrive at the same destination.