How to Be an Artist (According to Me) - Part 2

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!

So, if you read Part 1 of this two-part article, you should just jump ahead to the first question in great big font below. If you haven’t read yet, though you can do so here — and even if you don’t feel like bothering, keep reading and I’ll fill you in about what this article concerns and what I hope you take from it. You can work backward and not miss anything, trust me.

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’m sharing a sort of postscript in two parts (again, find Part 1 here). 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 second 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.

Read Part 1 of “How to Be an Artist (According to Me)” here.

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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 Cope with Rejection in the Arts

Here’s the thing about my creative output: I have a lot of ideas and I put work into developing and realizing a lot of them. What I mean by this is, some writers have a handful of ideas a year they care about. Me? I have a couple dozen. And I’ve learned not to be precious about them either, which I think is important to point out. I graciously thank the universe for them and the fun I have working on them, then accept they will have their time in the sun if and when they find their right shape – or they’ll just fade away.

The problem is, you never know when your ideas are truly ready or, as important, if the world is ready for them. As a screenwriter – which is what I spend most of my time doing – you have to stress-test them in a manner, sharing them with potential collaborators. This most often means producers. Do they respond positively? Sometimes they do, and that leads to paid work and the opportunity to bring an idea fully to fruition. Amazing. Sometimes they don’t and the idea slips into the “needs more work” pile. Such is life.

There’s another scenario, too, which is where an idea excites a lot of people, leaving them brimming with confidence about its future, but nobody – say a studio or streamer – wants to financially engage with it. If you’re a high-output writer like me, that’s going to happen a lot. It’s a statistical reality of having so many ideas you’re passionate about.

This means, I have been rejected a lot.

A lot.

There are more factors than I could list here that determine whether someone wants to financially invest in a story you want to tell. Maybe they’re developing a competing project they don’t want you to know about. Maybe they developed a similar one that went nowhere a few years before. Maybe the last film like yours bombed last weekend so now nobody wants to make romantic horrors anymore. Maybe their boss has mandated they can’t buy any more action films or comedy TV series. Maybe their boss has mandated they need to focus more on period dramas set in space. Maybe they’re scared their boss will fire them if they get it wrong again. Maybe they loved the idea, but your agent was a dick to them when they tried to make an offer. Who knows? You certainly don’t because whatever official excuse is given, my experience is that it’s rarely the real one.

Before I’d sold my first pitch, I wrote a screenplay that a production company’s development executive loved. She told me her boss wanted to buy it and they would be reaching out to my agents. The next day, I got a call from said agents that the boss was, despite what I’d been informed, passing. The development exec later explained to me later that the boss had had a fight with his wife that morning – over a blowjob! – and, because it didn’t go his way, he decided to take it out on my script. It’s probably one of the most creative and silly passes I’ve ever received, but I think it’s illustrative of how absurdly hard it is for the stars to align to sell a project in Hollywood or any film/TV industry around the world.

I share all this with you so that you understand rejection is commonplace in the arts – and it’s not necessarily a rejection of you or your work. We have no choice but to learn and grow as a result. The ideas that get passed on keep growing, too. Maybe they get repurposed in another project like when I sold a TV series that began as a rejected film pitch. Or perhaps one of them evolves into a novel, as one of mine did (Psalms for the End of the World was the result of that rejection story). You get the picture.

Embrace rejection. I truly believe it’s good for you and the stories you’re trying to gift to the world.

How to Create Art After Children Blow Up Your Life

What I don’t want to do here is issue some kind of blanket advice because I became a father while married to a wonderful partner. That partner, my wife, experienced parenthood very differently than I did. Many people, especially women who give birth themselves, could say the same. But I can talk about what creatively happened to me and what has continued to happen to me over the years as my children have grown up. Perhaps some of it will resonate with you.

It's all a matter of focus, which of course becomes more and more difficult as your offspring take up more and more of your physical and – especially – your mental energy. I mention this because I don’t think people discuss it enough, from my experience. To create, your brain needs to have the space – no, the freedom – to venture in exciting directions. You have to be able to provide it stimulation, too, to act as a kind of creative fertilizer. Children, for lack of better words, invade this space and steal this freedom — the selfish little shits. Less so when they’re babies, but more and more so as their needs begin to multiply.

This doesn’t mean that the same children don’t also inspire us, expand our hearts, turn us into better writers in other ways. There’s just no getting around the fact that the creative process is very different with them in your life than before they were born (and perhaps after they leave home, but I don’t have that experience yet). For example, before my eldest son was born back in 2014, I could juggle writing four feature screenplays for studios/streamers in a year. I often even turned drafts in early. At the same time, I was still developing multiple other projects. I mean, I wrote and sold a feature screenplay on my lunch breaks during the “Dracula” writers’ room! Today, even if I could hire a nanny to take my children to and from school and care for them until five when I stop working, I doubt I could turn around two feature screenplays in a single year of a quality I would be proud of. My brain is just pulled in too many directions. Most of the time, I just want to sit down and take a goddamn break.

It's not even all about my children, to be clear. I think they fractured my focus so supremely that I now have trouble focusing on just a few projects. I’m juggling so many that it creates an entirely different kind of focal anxiety and exhaustion. Once I was a laser, now I’m a diffuse glow. I miss the sharpness.

So, how do I do it? I compartmentalize all my work, both professional and personal. I keep an incredibly detailed calendar that tells me what to do, so I don’t have to waste mental energy remembering what is required of me in life. And, most importantly, I write without judgment. Some days, the writing is good. Some days, it’s not. Some days I have to recognize my brain does not want to write prose. Great, I forgive myself for that, and I focus instead on editing, or another Substack article, or keeping my corporation’s books because, at the end of the day, a life as a professional artist requires more than just producing art. And if none of that works, I go for a walk, or visit a museum, or go lay down in the grass somewhere and watch branches wave in the wind. That’s maybe the biggest “lesson” to impart here:

Writing is about more than writing. As you grow older, as your life changes, how you write will, too. It’s okay. You’re okay. Most of all, stop trying to be someone else, whether that’s an earlier version of you or other writers who don’t have your same challenges.

How to Survive the Creative Embarrassment of Working in Genre

I’ve never experienced a film/TV industry so culturally dismissive of genre as Australia’s – especially if we’re talking about horror. An Aussie horror film can be an international box office smash, but people involved with it will still apologize for it as if ashamed of what they’ve done. Part of the reason for this is because genre films tend to do incredibly well overseas, and so such films are seen as more commercial and, thus, less creatively serious and/or respectable. It’s incredibly disheartening considering how many great genre films Australia has produced over the decades.

But let’s interrogate this observation, or rather contextualize it. How does it compare to, say, the United States film industry? Well, the U.S.’s biggest box office of all-time list is dominated by genre films…but genre films are almost wholly ignored by every major award in the country. This year, Demi Moore is being celebrated for her spectacular performance in The Substance (2024), but so much of the discourse leading up to awards season was whether the Academy, in particular, could nominate her for her work in a horror film — though, amazingly, both she and the film itself were nominated. Year after year, things like this are said aloud because genre films are regularly snubbed. Avengers: Endgame (2019) is the biggest film of all time, was hailed as great by critics, and, as a screenwriter, I can assure you was an unprecedented narrative feat that is unlikely to be produced in the future. Did it get a Best Picture nomination? No. The Dark Knight (2009) is regularly called the best super-hero film of all time and was, again, a commercial and critical smash. No Best Picture nomination. While there are certainly exceptions – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and Avatar (2009) wont Best Picture – a survey of the films that garnered nominations and awards by the Oscars over the past almost-century would reveal an overwhelming and – I would argue – incredibly elitist summary judgment of “genre films”.

I share this because it’s important to understand that artists tend to enjoy genre far more than they’re willing to celebrate it as great art. They consume it as much as anyone else, I mean, but our culture has very specific ideas about what is serious, what matters, what deserves our respect. And so I think it’s worth considering the following:

Many artists and those who act as gatekeepers to the arts are snobs. In their quest to be seen as serious – but, really, I think cool – they make themselves look unserious. It hurts the art forms they allegedly love so much, too, imposing a class system on them from within rather than from the outside. It might be necessary to collaborate with such people, but you should never let them deter you from the belief that genre storytelling is no different than…I actually don’t know what we’re supposed to call non-genre stories. That’s the best part here. We’re discussing stories, and yet some stories have a completely arbitrary asterisk slapped on to them. Fuck that asterisk!

How to (Not) Think About Your Audience as You Create

In my introduction to the article linked to here, I referenced Ansel Adams’ quote, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” I’ve been writing professionally for nearly 20 years, and I have never seen a lick of evidence that this isn’t true about all art. Sure, an artist might opt to create without the audience in mind, but there is nothing more integrous about creating this way than when taking the audience into consideration. Not for my money, at least. The problem is that many people – artists, critics, even some audiences – have been led to believe that acknowledging people will eventually experience art for themselves somehow corrupts the creative process. It becomes commercial. “Crowd-pleaser” is a bad word. But that’s not the only way to consider your audience.

A piece of art requires a conversation with someone other than the artist for it to achieve any real meaning. If it only matters to the artist, then you find yourself with the creative world’s equivalent of the question, “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, did it really happen?” In other words, who cares about the art you create just for yourself? That’s like journaling, in my mind. Your journals are for you, for your own emotional and spiritual illumination. However, if you publish those journals, they cease to just be a conversation you’re having only with yourself. Others get to weigh in, too. They get to interpret, opine, and even redefine what those journals really mean – subjectively and objectively (as much as anything can be objective).

Art exists in a constant, ever-evolving dialogue with our culture. As we change, so does the meaning we assign to the art. Why is it wrong for the artist to bear this in mind? To comment on the reader’s own relationship to their work or others’ work? To create a reading or viewing experience that anticipates their reaction and manipulates it or subverts it or blows it up? After all, Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most important filmmakers to ever live. Everything he did was for the audience’s enjoyment – and yet we never question his art today. We appreciate that he imbued his work with his own fears and anxieties and used his craft to make others experience the same. If we want to talk more “serious” artists, whatever that means, look at Jean-Luc Godard. His work is a political statement from start to finish; he consciously transmogrifies blunt-force propaganda into dazzling art to challenge and change minds. While I don’t know if he was a George Orwell super-fan, Orwell would’ve approved of this approach since he preached it himself.

There’s another description for what Orwell, Hitchcock, and Godard did, as far as I’m concerned: manipulating your audience.

Not every story requires such an approach, but it’s not the equivalent of selling out and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

How to Become Better Storytellers by Studying Other Artists' Work

When I asked artists to deliver a mini-lecture on a seminal piece of work in their own creative lives, one of the reasons was because I wanted to help 5AM StoryTalk’s readers further develop their own ability to interrogate art themselves. It’s a skill, but one that has to be learned and practiced. Doing so by example is a good way to develop your own approach.

That said, I’ve been interrogating art here at Substack for some 19 months now. I’ve done it in extraordinary detail, too, taking many different approaches. If you would permit me, I’m going to skip doing so again in the context of this article rather than wait and tackle another title in appropriate depth later this year. Instead, I’m just going to share five articles of my own that show how I do it (you’ll find many more the deeper you dive into the archives here):

“14 Perfect Minutes: Breaking Down the Opening of 'Jaws'"

“This 100-Year-Old Silent Film Will Challenge Everything You Think You Know About Structure”

“What That Last Brownie Really Means in 'Notting Hill'"

“Luke Skywalker Isn't the Hero You Want Him to Be”

“The Real Reason Why 'Watchmen' Is So F@cking Great”

How to Survive the Future as an Artist

Back in 2012, Dark Horse Comics published my first comic book series, The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde, which I’d also been hired to adapt as a feature film. At the time, my career was finally beginning to take off. I’d made it on The Black List and I was selling two to three projects a year as a result of that and the immense amount of hard work and preparation I’d put into my career and building relationships around Hollywood. Which is probably why when I asked my representatives about pursuing more comic book work – just for my own pleasure since I loved the medium so much – they told me I needed to stay focused on delivering strong drafts and landing more work. This was the time to take advantage of my heat, not get distracted by relatively low-paying work writing comics.

At the time, this advice seemed sound. I primarily wanted to be a filmmaker and I had professional momentum. If I got a film or TV series made, so many more doors would open to me. But a decade later, after barely surviving the financial devastation of Covid on my career, I realized it was the absolutely wrong thing to do. Why is that?

Well, comic books provided me three things:

1. I could create my own intellectual property in a space where budget wasn’t an issue, meaning I could tell stories largely on my own terms and end up with IP I could set up in Hollywood as a result.

2. I love comic books. Writing them is a lot of fun. Back in 2012, I had boundless energy, too. Had I exploited my success at the time to get more work in the medium, I would’ve expanded my future narrative opportunities – bringing me more creative satisfaction, not just financial reward.

3. Comic books don’t pay Hollywood money, that’s for sure. But they do provide a very real income and, during Covid, when so much development and production crashed after the first few months of lockdowns and despair, they would’ve been enough to keep me from going in the hole. Later, when my family moved to Australia, rebooting my career outside of the U.S. for a second time in five years would’ve been less stressful had I, again, had comic books to fall back on. This third point actually leads to a bigger point, the real point of my answer here…

When I moved to the United Kingdom and, later, to Australia, I discovered arts communities that didn’t just focus put their eggs all in one basket – for creative and financial reasons. In Hollywood, almost every writer I know is primarily a film/TV screenwriter. They don’t write plays. They don’t write radio plays. They don’t write podcasts. They don’t write comic books. And they don’t write novels. Much of the reason for this, I believe, is the advice given by reps who don’t understand the point of getting 10% of a $10,000 deal. It’s not worth their time when there might be a $100K or $1 million deal around the corner. In the U.K., that’s very different as your shit-paying gigs tend to bring the most artistic credibility and, thus, lead to greater professional success in the long run. Reps aren’t trying to cash in today; they’re trying to get a piece of the big paydays that will come later. In Australia…well, I haven’t worked out what the agenting philosophy is yet, as it doesn’t really overlap with how agents in other countries work. But that aside, artists take a similarly diversified approach to their careers. They’re not multi-hyphenates here – they’re multi-slashies.

Multi-slashies are jacks of all trades. Consequently, you have more ways to creatively express yourself and pay your bills. Since I left the States, I’ve embraced this philosophy – which I think can only really become the norm in countries that don’t pay as much as Hollywood does for film/TV scripts – which has resulted in my career expanding beyond film, TV, and occasionally comic books to include novels, stage plays, and, thanks to 5AM StoryTalk, personal essays.

This is how I think artists have to prepare for the future. Diversification. A life of constantly being creatively pulled in more directions than you can probably go. But in relying on ten different sources of income rather than just one or two, you can far better survive the topsy-turvy life of an artist in industries increasingly focused on consolidation, cost-cutting, and how to use AI to replace us. After all, if you can’t live, you can’t create.

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