The idea I’ll be teasing out here is a mash-up, which is itself the first lesson: creativity comes from putting things together that haven’t gone together before. Which in turn immediately needs two further qualifications:
a) Most mash-ups fail. There’s a reason you like tomatoes with basil, but not so much tomatoes with turnips or basil with caramel. You probably could find a way to make the latter two combos work, but they would be the culinary equivalent of a novelty song.
b) Most mash-ups that dominate the internet these days are not creative mash-ups, but the rather sad retreads of a culture that is increasingly incapable of creating anything new, so it resorts to nostalgia instead. (Why that should be so is a topic for another time.) See also sequels that never come close to the genius of the original, and reboots-because-money.
Anyway, back to the beginning: my mash-up is the result of studying the indie publishing phenomenon for the past three years or so, with the goal of becoming part of it myself, plus learning more idly and just for pleasure about the history of rock-and-roll. (Most credit for that learning goes to the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.)
I’ve also dabbled in big-idea-nonfiction lit about creativity and entrepreneurship, such as Range by David Epstein, Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, and various works from Derek Sivers and Mark McGuinness, among others. Not to mention following the nose of my own fandom.
Thus I’ve developed, in the same idle, fandom kind of way, a working hypothesis of two trajectories toward creative success. Next batch of caveats:
a) This isn’t exhaustive. It’s just the two I happen to have noticed.
b) Neither of these trajectories guards against the one-hit wonder phenomenon. Actually, if any big-idea-nonfiction authors are by chance reading this, I would really love to see a study of one-hit wonders in all genres across a wide range of media. Either we’d learn a lot about how success gets sabotaged or sabotages itself—or, we’d have further evidence that all systems are full of randomness and chaos, and one-hit wonders are just the floatsam that gets tossed to the surface now and again. I’d be happy to know, either way.
c) Neither of these trajectories accounts for genius, either. Yes, yes, I know that the very concept of genius is a product of romanticism, and it does immense harm to would-be creatives who run the useless thought experiment: “Will I ever be as great as Beethoven / Jane Austen / the Beatles? No. So why bother?” My philosophy of life declares that most people need, in order to flourish, to be engaged in creative pursuits (which include raising a family or launching a business just as much as “art”); and that people also need to separate out anyone else’s definition of “success” from the pleasure taken in their creative pursuits. So, please just don’t run that paralyzing thought experiment. Statistically speaking, there are just gonna be some extreme outliers, and we call them geniuses. Nobody has any control over that, so it’s more or less useless to study the trajectory of geniuses (with the possible exception of the fact that it will show you how even geniuses were surrounded by support systems and really didn’t do it alone).
Now, after all that throat-clearing, two possible trajectories to creative success.
#1. Attentive, Iterative, Audience-Oriented.
I didn’t realize it until listening to the History of Rock podcast, but the indie authors of the past 10–15 years who have had success by writing in niche subgenres, cultivating a dedicated fan base, and putting out new works on a breakneck schedule are much more like musicians and others in the performing arts than they’re like the traditional writing world. In a sense, the speed and ease of indie publishing made writer-as-performer possible at all.
Here's how it usually works. The writer selects a genre—usually the more niche, the better—and puts out a first book. It’s not great, but it’s OK. The writer learns lessons from the failures of the first effort, puts out a second. Then a third. Ideally, in this trajectory, within a year’s time. All the while they’re building up direct relationships with fans, whether on Facebook et al. or through an author website with a regular newsletter for fans who sign up.
There are several crucial factors here. One is staying very close to subgenre conventions and giving the fans exactly what they want, so far as that goes. The other is the growth of fan conversation between themselves as well as with the author, giving constant feedback to what is working and what isn’t. For the writer, this fan feedback is the essential factor. There’s nothing wrong, in fact everything right, in adjusting according to fan tastes.
I’ve heard of some such subgenre authors writing whole spin-offs around beloved side characters, or even allowing fans to vote on which way the plot will twist next. For these kind of authors, this is fun and rewarding, not a compromise on integrity. It builds up an enthusiastic community around a created world of characters and settings. It’s deeply collaborative, and also remunerative, because the fans know the author cares and wants them to get what they want.
To return to the rock music comparison, Ryan Holiday in Perennial Seller discusses the band Iron Maiden. Their purpose was to satisfy Iron Maiden fans and no one else. For the band and the fans, it was an ideal relationship, and what anyone else thought about it was entirely irrelevant.
Another music case study is Bill Haley and the Comets (this from the aforementioned podcast). They were really all over the place, trying lots of things out, which in itself is a good way to cultivate creativity. But their real superpower was paying close attention to what got the audience up and dancing. Evidently they played over 180 high school dances for free, because of the incredibly important audience feedback they got! That’s what led, eventually, to “Rock Around the Clock.” And, fascinatingly, it was the loss of that specific feedback loop after they got big—because hysterical fans cheered at absolutely everything—that took out their superpower in the end.
Analogous is the case of Steve Martin, as he reports in his memoir of his stand-up days. Blessed by a total absence of both fame and smartphones, he could just go place to place, try stuff out, keep what worked and ditch the rest. I think this is a clear-cut case of someone who had his own intrinsic vision and drive, yet refined that continually against an audience to serve the audience’s pleasure. If stand-up comedy isn’t audience-oriented, I don’t know what is!
So that’s one trajectory: venture out there with a creative offering, pay attention to what your fans like, and maintain that feedback loop throughout your creative career.
#2. Experimental, Expansive, Vision-Oriented.
Of course, there will be those who read the foregoing with horror and contempt. Where’s the artistic vision? integrity? uniqueness? Doesn’t this inevitably compromise on principles? What if you want to challenge your fan base and they just won’t have it?
Fine; don’t go the foregoing route. I wouldn’t, myself. But it’s not because I hold it in contempt (or I should say, not anymore. I’ve come around). The genius myth disqualifies collaborative creation with fans from the get-go. And maybe there won’t be many enduring works of art that come out of it. But frankly, not many enduring works of art come out of this second trajectory, either. If you’re only in this in the hopes of being Michelangelo, you’re probably in it for the wrong reasons and won’t produce enduring art anyway.
So what’s this second trajectory, if not either genius or starving poet in a Paris garret?
The initial distinguishing factor is that the writer, musician, or artist has a unique vision or direction to pursue, and pursues it regardless. Fan feedback is welcome and interesting, but not determinative. If you want to make any money at all from your creative productions, then to some extent you need to venture into these kinds of dialogues with potential buyers—at the very least, find out if your book covers are attracting the right kind of readers, or your distribution systems are reaching readers—but in the end you don’t write to order, alter according to fan wishes, or stay the hand of challenge.
Needless to say, this is going to be a harder sell, not just in money but in attention, period. People are loyal to brands that serve up the expected. (Life is chaotic enough as it is. Why not have reassuringly familiar art? Come on, admit how much you listen to the same songs, read the same books, and watch the same movies, over and over and over.) It will be a bigger challenge to attract fans who love your creative vision and are willing to follow wherever it leads, however much it may vary in genre and outcome.
So how to make this work? Here, I think, is the secret. (Yay! The whole human race has been waiting for the secret of ART and at last I’m going to reveal it!) This is it:
Make a lot of art.
That’s it. Produce abundantly and excessively. Ignore the inner critic and perfectionist. Don’t do your projects to death. If you have a vision, keep trying different ways to express it, kick those expressions out the door, and head on to the next one.
There is good evidence that this is the winning strategy. First, on speed: an uncanny number of great books and albums come out of speed instead of time. I can’t remember specific examples at the moment, but I have read multiple times of songs that were shot off in half a day at the studio and released as the B-side, only to become multi-million sellers, while the concept album labored over for a year receiving all the musician’s loving attention turned out to be a total dud. A lot of brilliant books were written in a weekend, or with the time pressure of serialization. It’s just not true that more time makes something better. Of course, it’s also not true that fast and shoddy makes something better. But artists with a vision are much more likely to err on the side of dithering and delay.
Second, you really have no idea which of your many efforts is going to be the winning one. Artists are remarkably bad judges of that. (So are publishers and producers. Evidently Random House was so named in explicit acknowledgement that nobody knows anything about what makes for success in books—it’s all random.) I’m not gonna name names here, but there are a few books by a few authors in my all-time top ten list. I love these books so, so much, and can reread them endlessly without diminution in pleasure. And, I’ve tried other books by these same authors… and hate them. I mean, absolutely despise and loathe them. One-hit wonders, maybe? I don’t know. But from the authors’ side, there’s a lifetime body of work, and they have no way of knowing which creative effort is going to be the best. You can’t control reception, but you can control your productivity. So keep going.
Another reason for abundance in production is that, as far as I can tell, the duds do actually feed the successes—sorry to say it to both creative and consumer, but it’s true. I’ll name names this time: Ursula K. LeGuin is one of my most favorite authors. She has a number of brilliant, transformative books. She also has some of the worst books I’ve ever read. I can tell you why those others failed: her ideological passions got the better of her art. (I’m tempted by the same error, so I can recognize it when I see it.) But her works of art that succeed are no less informed by her passionate commitments—only in those cases, the art won over the ideology. But looking at her whole lifetime of work, I think she probably needed, personally, to write the explicit, ideological, on-the-nose works for herself. And that’s OK: all art on some level is processing the self. It doesn’t mean anyone else has to love it. But it may be necessary to do that in order to get where you need to get, and genuinely reach others in so doing.
Likewise, Agatha Christie’s thrillers are pretty ho-hum. They’re nothing on her best detective novels. But my guess is that she needed to refresh herself with another genre before returning to what she did best, and why not? Nobody’s making you buy or read her thrillers. She didn’t have to hit it out of the park every time. But I doubt she would have hit it out of the park as often as she did if she hadn’t taken time to do something else creative that she wasn’t quite as good at. And I also bet the reason she has so many brilliant, unmatched detective novels is because she wrote so many of them. They’re not all equally good. But the greats required her breakneck pace of writing and experimenting. It’s also worth noting that for all her fame, Agatha did not write in response to fan requests. She famously rebuffed all efforts to force ideas on her. Only two of her novels had even the seed of an idea from someone else (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the murderer, Death Comes As the End for being set in ancient Egypt). Her audience loved her, but she didn’t cater to them. But she did produce an astonishing quantity of work, and from that massive output emerged a surprisingly large number of gems.
So, if you have a vision, get to it, get it out there, and get on to the next thing. Even the duds and commercial failures will feed positively into the next project. In this very precise sense, quality is a byproduct of quantity. Nothing is ever wasted; in art, everything is recycled. Keep at it and eventually you will upcycle instead of downcycle.