How to Be an Artist (According to Me) - Part 1

This newsletter spent 2024 asking novelists, filmmakers, and comic book creators from around the globe to weigh in about how they create and navigate their industries - now it's my turn to answer!

Source: Chris Curry, Unsplash

In late 2023, I had a brilliant idea: what if every month of 2024, I posed a single arts question to 15 to 25 authors, filmmakers, and comic book creators from around the globe at various stages of their professional careers? My reasoning was that the answers – drawn from such a diverse pool – would provide significantly more insight into subjects than I alone could.

Well, as it turned out, the idea was brilliant. The juxtaposition of perspectives and experiences was hugely edifying to me, the artists who participated, and, I hope, you, too, my dear readers. But that said, this choral arts series was also so spectacularly time-consuming that I had to trade far more time with my family than I hoped in order to pull it off. That’s part of the reason why I discontinued it as a regular feature last month after its twelfth installment.

Now that it’s wrapped up, I want to offer a sort of postscript in two parts. In asking these questions to more than 150 other artists, I intentionally left myself out of the conversation, very rarely doing more than offering a glimpse of how I felt about what was being discussed. I’ve decided it’s time to share my own answers.

In some ways, I’m hesitant to do this. While I obviously share many of my perspectives about art in this newsletter, I try to avoid doing so in any way that might be too construed as instruction. Meaning, “You should think and do this as a rule.” I hate rules. I don’t think they really exist in the arts, except as false constructs that limit and even harm us and the stories we tell.

Don’t get me wrong here, there are certainly guidelines. There are certainly standard practices that you can follow, manipulate to your advantage, or otherwise choose to ignore. But rules? Enh, I’m skeptical. Likewise, you should be skeptical of anyone selling you easy solutions to becoming an author or screenwriter or anything similar without doing a lot of tedious, often painful work first.

It’s because of this that I now point out that the answers I’m sharing today are only to make you think and interrogate your own feelings on the subjects, to hopefully challenge you and help you evolve in ways appropriate to your own creative journeys.

Long story short: find below my answers to the first six questions I asked artists in 2024. Each title will link you to the original article so you can read what everyone else I asked thought on the subject. Don’t hesitate to use the comments section here to ask follow-ups; I’ll do my best to answer them all.

---

For professional and geographical context, as was also provided for contributors to this series: Cole Haddon is an Australia-based Australian-American screenwriter. He’s worked extensively on three continents. He created the TV series “Dracula”, which premiered in 2013. His debut novel Psalms for the End of the World was published by Headline Books and Hachette Australia in 2022. His most recent work was on Season 2 of “Troppo” on Amazon; he wrote Episode 6.

How to Survive the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life of an Artist

Question: How do you keep on keeping on despite the stress of “not knowing”, professional uncertainty, and creative self-doubt? But also, how do you do so in the face of obstacles such as a nine-to-five job, family, mental health, and more that can make committing fully to your craft difficult in the 21^st century?

There’s a film I return to almost every year called Beautiful Girls. In fact, I love it so much that I’ve written about it here and cajoled its screenwriter Scott Rosenberg to let me interrogate him about it. In it, an aspiring musician returns home from the big city for his ten-year high school reunion. His old friends are mostly a mix of blue-collar types, though one has a white-collar job he had to get a college degree to land. While the white-collar friend is a family man now and has to deal with that life, the general vibe of this friends group is one of comfortable routine. They go to work, hit the bar together, go to work, meet up at the diner together, ice fish, hit the bar together, go to work, and so on. Life just functions the way it always has for most working-class people. As for the aspiring musician, he doesn’t fit into this world, but desperation is driving him to consider trading his artsy dreams for a practical paycheck.

Every year when I rewatch Beautiful Girls, a part of me fantasizes about that practical paycheck, the comfortable routine, a life of relative certainty and even mundanity.

Don’t mistake me here, I could never do it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish my life as a professional artist could come with all of the trappings of the more traditional working-class lives so many of my oldest friends pursued. After all, outside of a rare stretch of unexpected unemployment, they never have to wonder where their next job is coming from, they never worry they’re not going to be able to pay for a mortgage, and they never think about how taking time off or even a vacation might compromise their income.

If you’re not sure what I mean in that last instance, I should point out that the last two vacations I took overlapped with job opportunities that popped up while I was traveling – jobs I creatively wanted because I loved the people I’d be working with. I had to pass on both. As a very accomplished Australian screenwriter recently told me, she hasn’t taken a scheduled vacation in years. Once you schedule one, work comes along you can’t – or shouldn’t – turn down. Better to take spontaneous ones. Except spontaneous is hard when you’re in your forties and have children, as I am and do.

So, what am I getting at here?

The life of the artist is a brutal one for people who do not come from privilege. I went six figures into debt to finance my college education and survive my first six years in Hollywood. It was an absurd gamble, and one that doesn’t pay off for the majority of people who make similar ones. I got lucky. The reason I’ve been able to continue to pay my bills this way is my prolificity — that, and I now work in multiple countries around the world and in multiple mediums. I have carefully built a life for myself where I can juggle projects that pay my bills with projects that bring me creative and personal satisfaction (such as this arts newsletter). Having an incredibly supportive wife – who is a successful artist herself – certainly helps.

How do you keep on keeping on despite all the uncertainty that comes with an artist’s life, with all the distractions of family and life in general, even with a 9-to-5 job to keep up? I will be blunt with you. It’s hard and it only gets harder as you get older. The only reason to do this to yourself is because you cannot imagine living any other life. Art has to be a religious calling, if you want to describe it that way. Otherwise, there is no way to spiritually endure what it will do to you as you leave behind the more carefree days of your youth. We cannot spend our entire lives as starving artists. That fabled bohemian freedom eventually confronts financial, familial, even medical realities. To get over that hump, you have to be calculated, you have to accept pragmatic compromises about your time and where your energy is applied, and you have to make sure you understand how to budget such an existence.

Because, as hard as this can be to accept, real success as an artist isn’t a straight line up to some magical peak. It’s a wavy line that goes up and dips and goes up again and dips harder. What we achieve in the end – creatively and financially – is an aggregate of highs and terrible lows.

How to Stop Worrying and Love the Rewrite - Part 1 and Part 2

Question: There are many theories about how to tackle a first draft, from strict outlining, to pantsing it (as the British say about making it up as you go along), to vomit drafts that begin with an outline but incorporate every whim you have along the way to discover characters and plot. Let’s talk about rewriting, though. What is your approach to finding your story’s true identity in all the work you put into that first draft?

For me, rewriting is 90% of the writing I do. You could even say my real job is rewriting.

My preferred approach is to start with a rough outline, a sort of tour guide through the story I hope to tell. This is true of my fiction, screenplays, and even my essays. This outline tends to be sloppily compiled. There might be scraps of potential descriptions and/or dialogue. Maybe links to relevant research. Not much more. I just want to know what the story thinks it’s going to be. It rarely turns out that way, though.

At this point, I begin to write my first draft. If it’s a novel, I need to know what the first sentence of the first chapter is before I start typing. If it’s a screenplay, I will start at any point in it where I feel I inspired to dive into and discover the characters. I never write unless I’m confident I will get through at least one chapter (or structured section of a chapter) or scene.

The next day, I reread everything I’ve written and edit it as I go. Only then do I move on to the next scene. The reason why is that each day’s writing tends to produce discoveries about characters and the story that radically change my understanding of both. Rewriting from the beginning means I can constantly update the whole story to reflect what I’ve learned about it.

An example would be my debut novel Psalms for the End of the World, a sprawling mosaic novel that finds connections across time and even dimensions. By returning to the beginning of the manuscript each day, I wasn’t just looking for ways to reflect and even foreshadow what was coming later in the story, but I was also looking for details early on that I unconsciously put in there and paid off later in ways I also hadn’t recognized yet. There were strands everywhere to tie together, I mean.

I should point out that in the case of novels, it’s not possible to read a whole manuscript every day as your page count gets up there – and Psalms reached 625 Word pages in the end – but most fiction tends to come in blocks of story. In my case, Psalms was broken down into three sub-books within the whole. I used my approach for Book I, then moved on and repeated it with Book II. At that point, I went back and began rewriting from the beginning again, propelling me into Book III. Then, again, I repeated from the beginning…probably another 30 times. In all, I estimate I read and rewrote Psalms more than 50 times.

This is how I write screenplays, as well. Write. The next day, rewrite the previous day’s work, then move on to new scene work. And when the whole draft is finished, read and rewrite (typically) dozens more times. I have scripts with more than 300 different saved drafts in a folder on my laptop before I finally share a “first draft” with my agents and/or deliver them to producers.

As I said upfront: my real job is rewriting (wherever that happens in your process). If you’re trying to pretend otherwise, I would gently suggest you have a lot to learn about your craft.

How to Find That Sweet, Sweet Creative Inspiration

Question: Creative inspiration can be elusive for some. Can you discuss how you find it, from where you go to leave yourself open to it, to the tools you’ve developed to be ready for and foster it in your work?

This is a subject I’ve written about many times here at 5AM StoryTalk, though perhaps never as explicitly as, “Pay attention, I’m going to tell you how I work.” For example, last year I wrote “A Eulogy for Everything We Never Were (and Never Will Be Again)” about my decision to permanently leave the United States. In it, I detail how this life-changing move was set in motion by a visit to “the Secret Annex” – the Anne Frank House. I was so shaken by the experience that I decided to write a screenplay about Otto Frank’s decision to publish his daughter’s diaries. In fact, within minutes of walking out of the Anne Frank House, I had a working idea of the film’s entire structure. However, what I left out in “Eulogy” was why I think inspiration struck in the first place.

The artist’s life is about far more than the actual act of creation. As I described a moment ago, 90% of my writing is rewriting, but that’s not entirely fair to how I really work because nearly 99% of my actual job is leaving myself open to inspiration.

Some might call this thinking — and that’s true, I suppose. I think a lot. You could even call it a form of conscious curiosity (curiosity, like thinking, requires practice). But I’d say what I’m trying to describe here is an even deeper act on par with a kind of waking meditation. When I’m in this imaginative fog, I drift through it until I collide with ideas I couldn’t see coming until – bam! – I walk face first into them.

This is what happened to me at the Anne Frank House. I entered the building with the intention of emotionally trapping myself in it, a very conscious choice. What I mean is, I didn’t feel the need to visit it to tick it off a list of must-see things to do when in Amsterdam. I needed to visit it to try to understand the terror her family experienced. I needed to at least glimpse it, as much as that was possible. I lingered in claustrophobic rooms until others left, so I could be left alone where Anne played and cried and read and slept for as long as possible. I closed my eyes, to imagine how trapped she must’ve felt. And, as thoughts of my own son slipped into my mind, I found myself in Otto Frank’s shoes, watching his daughter write, unable to communicate with her despite the years they’d spent here together.

Later in the tour, Otto revealed in a video interview he only really got to know his daughter after she died, through her diaries. That was it for me. That was more than I could bear. My son was only two, but I couldn’t imagine going through life feeling so emotionally estranged from him or regretting never really knowing him if something were to happen to him. I started working on the screenplay that would become The Secret Annex before I’d even returned home to Los Angeles.

How to Survive Your Biggest Mistakes as an Artist

Question: Talk to me about mistakes. For example, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as an artist and what did it teach you?

I’ve written so many articles here at 5AM StoryTalk about mistakes I’ve made (for example: here, here, and here), this question could feel like an invitation to repeat myself. But the truth is, I’ve made so many more than I’ve discussed here and I’ll likely make many more before I drop dead. That said, I haven’t discussed my biggest mistake before, nor what it taught me. Here goes:

I let other people tell me what kind of a career I should have – which is another way to say, I let other people tell me what kind of artist I should be.

For context, I grew up very working-class. Everyone around me assumed my career was going to be retail, manual labor, or, if I earned a university degree, maybe teaching or accounting. In all cases, the expectation was I would spend the rest of my life doing something I hated. Succeeding in Hollywood was just a way to escape this fate. When I finally did that, the idea of going back was something I refused to accept as a possibility.

This meant, I needed to sell more. Work begets work in Hollywood, I was told my reps and everyone around me. Another way to put that, success begets success. Yet another way, money begets money. Money is the only thing that matters – or so your agents, your managers, your lawyers will try to convince you. In my case, they did by assuring me that work, success, and money would eventually translate to the freedom to write the kinds of films I really cared about. Pay my dues, basically, and I’d get to become the artist I wanted to be.

This was an easy spoonful of sugar to swallow because my success meant I didn’t have to go back to Detroit. It meant I could pay off the six figures of credit card debt I’d racked up “making it” in Hollywood. It meant I could finally travel the world and see all the places I’d dreamed of visiting.

But at the end of the day, there was no getting around the fact that every job I got was, in some way, a surrender of a part of myself. Not that I didn’t enjoy what I was doing. I put my all into them, and I only wrote films I genuinely wanted to watch. But like what Hollywood produces today, I was only doing one thing. I had to write big-budget blockbusters and, more specifically, I had to write blockbuster reimaginings of classic action-adventure-horror novels like, say, Dracula. Eventually, people began to even ask me to write new versions of novels I’d already been paid to adapt. I spiraled hard. I began to push back. I got angrier as a result. I didn’t break out of this cycle of creative misery until I left Hollywood for the United Kingdom, which is a pretty damn extraordinary way to reboot one’s career, if you ask me. But it was necessary in so many ways.

In brief: You only have one life. Either become the artist you want to be, or fail trying. Don’t become the one others want you to be. There are easier ways to make a soul-crushing living, believe me.

How to Make Art That Confronts the Darkness (Or Not)

Question: In a world that feels increasingly unstable, where so many struggle to hold on to hope, do you think artists have any responsibility to confront this darkness head-on in their work? And if the answer is no, what responsibility, if any, does the artist have in your mind?

So, I will never understand the argument that art can be created for no other purpose than to entertain. All art is political, whether you like it or not. What we choose to confront, or choose not to confront, says something about us as artists and the world around us.

Does that mean trying to comfort people with your art, helping them endure the otherwise unendurable, isn’t admirable? Of course it is. But even then, that decision is political, as far as I’m concerned. Striving to say nothing except “I hope you enjoyed yourself!” reinforces the status quo in some way or another, and I don’t see the point of that. The status quo has never been acceptable, and it probably never will be. So, creating what amounts to cultural propaganda to perpetuate said status quo doesn’t make much sense to me.

That said, I don’t think it’s my place or anyone else’s to dictate how others should engage with or create art – unless “dictating” in this case means to ensure they can do so with complete freedom, such as opposing book bans. There are, of course, a few other exceptions, but I trust you take my point.

We live in a dark world, my friends. It’s not like it hasn’t always been either. We might get confused about that fact during times of abundance, but the reality is, tens of millions are displaced or killed by war every year, hundreds of millions live in poverty every year, billions of women are systemically discriminated against at all levels of society every year, the Earth tilts more and more toward complete climatological collapse every year. I could go on here, but I’ll stop. It’s bleak shit. Why pretend that away when our art has the power to, in some small way, challenge minds and change hearts?

Ask yourself, how many of your favorite films don’t, in some way or another, take on something that’s wrong with us as a species? I mean, Tommy Boy isn’t just a hilarious feel-good comedy – it’s actually a class comedy and brutal takedown of American capitalism. Pretty Woman, the same. Working Girl, the same.

The films that move us the most, that we remember decades later, that changed us in some way were all made by artists who stared into the darkness and said, “Not on my watch, asshole.”

How to Escape the Box You've Become Trapped in as an Artist

Question: A question that comes up repeatedly – and which I know I have struggled with in my career – is: how do you avoid being put in a box as a storyteller and, if you are, how would you advise escaping it? Such as, being trapped as a horror novelist or a comedy screenwriter when your narrative ambitions are much broader than that.

I watch a lot of films with my ten-year-old. Afterward, I ask him questions like, “What did you think about it?” Or, “Who was your favorite character?” Or, “What do you think it was really about?” But the question I’ve learned never to ask is, “What was your favorite scene?” Because inevitably, his answer will be one of the last two or three that showed up onscreen – as if the rest of the film never happened. “Hey, kid, what was your favorite scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark?” “Er…the part where they opened up the Ark of the Covenant?” I’m not joking. That’s a real example.

My point here is this: this is what I find Hollywood is like. The people who put you in a box there work in a frenetic business where they’re required to meet and know and remember hundreds of people in anything like success. They don’t want to get to know four or five versions of you. They meet you once, and that version of you – whatever it is – is who you are forever to them. Well, until something miraculous happens to change their minds. That, I suppose, is the point of this question: how do you change how someone in Hollywood identifies you?

(I say Hollywood because most of the other markets I’ve worked in would never remotely imagine someone can only do one thing; as a U.K. producer once told me, “Here, we assume writers can write, which means they can do anything.”)

My short answer is to this question is: the fuck if I know.

My long answer is: if I knew, I wouldn’t have had to move overseas to get people to let me do something other than blow shit up in Victorian England – which happened to be a specialty of mine in Hollywood. Why was it a specialty of mine? Because the screenplay that introduced me to the town was an adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines. Consequently, that was who I became there. For-fucking-ever.

Even today, I still contend with this when I discuss projects with people who know me in Hollywood. I’ve been commissioned to write nine non-action TV pilots by non-American producers since I left the States. This isn’t counting an additional seven TV treatments I’ve been commissioned to write. Most of these involved internationally acclaimed, award-winning producers. I clearly have a whole other side to me. But a few months ago, a friend told me a producer didn’t want to consider me for a project because I was too much of a “period action guy”. I haven’t written a period action screenplay in close to a decade, but since I sat down with this person sixteen years ago after they’d read my King Solomon’s Mines adaptation, I will forever be that person to them. There’s no accounting for how I’ve grown as a screenwriter in a decade and a half or the fact that there isn’t any evidence anywhere in the world – outside of the imaginations of Hollywood “players” – that writers can only write one thing. Nope, I’m just the “period action guy”.

Hm, maybe I need to pen my own “I’m Just Ken” parody song:

'Cause I'm just a period action guy, anywhere else I'd be writing a hard drama
Is it my destiny to live and die a career of blowing carriages up?

On second thought, I probably shouldn’t try writing lyrics ever again.

Read Part 2 of this article here.

---

If this article added anything to your life but you’re not up for a paid subscription, consider buying me a “coffee” so I can keep as much of this newsletter free as possible for the dreamers who couldn’t afford it otherwise.

---

If you enjoyed this particular article, these other three might also prove of interest to you: