How to Survive the Sad, Uncertain Life of an Artist

Source: Louise Patterton, Unsplash

This week brings you the first minisode of 5AM StoryTalk’s Season 2. I wanted to start the new season with something that’s been on my mind lately – and the minds of many of my friends – which is how we’re expected to survive as artists. Not just in 2025, but going forward, too, as the world’s creative industries become ever more perilous places to forge careers thanks to fun things like AI, corporate greed, and fascism.

We’re going to dig into this reality together, to help you work out if this life as an artist is one you really want for yourself. But assuming you do, we’ll also be discussing five lifestyle and financial tips that I wish someone had given me when I first broke into Hollywood – but really, when I earned my first dollar as an artist. These tips will take you from your first job to financially, emotionally, and creatively enduring the increasingly difficult life of an artist in the 21^st century.

You can listen to this minisode as a podcast or read it below…

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There’s a film I return to almost every year called Beautiful Girls. Maybe you’ve seen it? It was released in 1996, directed by Ted Demme, written by Scott Rosenberg, starring a huge ensemble cast, the kind you only really got in the 90s.

The central protagonist is an aspiring musician named Willie, and he lives in the big city where he’s chasing his big dreams. Except that isn’t going so well. He plays piano in a bar and lives off the $1 bills customers tip him with.

It’s his 10-year high school reunion, so this guy heads home to his small town – a place he obviously did everything to escape – to attend the big event. But really, he goes home to soul-search. To work out what the hell he’s doing with his life.

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, familiar routine – everything Willie doesn’t have in a life depending on how many dollars people drop in his fishbowl.

These guys – his friends – 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 – like the ones I grew up with, too.

Willie doesn’t fit into this world – like I didn’t either – but desperation is driving him to consider trading his artistic dreams for a practical paycheck. While it might mean giving up what he wants most in life, he craves what I guess could most simply described as…stability.

So, here’s the thing. Every year when I rewatch Beautiful Girls, a part of me fantasizes about similar stability, the comfortable routine, a life of relative certainty and even mundanity. The life I traded when I left Detroit for Hollywood 20 years ago this year.

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 careers so many of my oldest friends pursued. I’m jealous of that in a lot of ways, the same way Willie is jealous of his friends in Beautiful Girls.

This is the great surprise becoming a professional artist eventually springs on you. Despite all the dreams of cultural independence, of a life less ordinary, of being able to devote all your time to exploring yourself and the world through art…you end up working far more than those “gullible, loser-friends” of yours who got the boring job, who played it safe, who swapped their dreams for a steady paycheck and, if they’re lucky, yearly paid vacation time.

And not only do you work more, you’ll typically do it for less and, to make matters even worse, very few of us will ever be able to call ourselves financially secure. I mean, I’ve had a very good career, I think, but I constantly worry about what I’m going to make next year, when that next job is going to come together, whether the contract is going to make or fall apart like the last two did. Should my family take that big trip or tighten our belts? It’s all a mystery.

Which, as it turns out, is a pretty challenging way to live, too.

I can tell you banks certainly don’t like that kind of income either, Not if you’re hoping to secure a home loan at some point.

So, what am I getting at here?

Today, I want to talk about a challenge I don’t see discussed publicly nearly enough by artists: the toll the life of an artist takes on me – you – any of us who pursue a life in the arts.

How do you keep on keeping on despite all the uncertainty that comes with an artist’s life?

For starters, I’m going to issue a broad warning with some help from some professional artist friends of mine.

Then, I’m going to give you five tips that I wish someone had provided me with when I arrived in Hollywood. Put another way, five tips I wish someone had given me when I decided I was going to find some way to be a professional artist come hell or high water.

These tips will take you from your first job to financially and emotionally enduring the increasingly difficult life of an artist in the 21^st century.

As for that warning…

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Try to imagine it as a blinking neon sign accompanied by blaring klaxons, all to get you to stop, immediately, and – imagine Samuel L. Jackson delivering the next words here—

Run, motherfucker, run!

Seriously, go back, do anything else, find some other way to be happy if you can.

[Your host goes to the fridge. Makes a snack plate for himself. Returns.]

Still here?

I thought so.

It never works anyway, but I had to try.

The reality is, you’ve probably only listened this far because you can’t imagine any other way to be happy. You want to tell stories. No, you need to tell stories. Because you’re a member of humanity’s oldest club.

So, let’s see what we can do to help you on that journey.

I asked some friends of mine what they think is the key to making it in the arts.

First up, Meg LeFauve, who co-wrote both Inside Out films, The Good Dinosaur, Captain Marvel, and more – she’s also the co-host of the wonderful podcast The Screenwriting Life – told me the secret wasn’t overly complex or glamours. It was something else…

Grit. Doing it when you don’t want to, when you don’t have time, putting the writing first, when you are full of doubt and when you think the writing is shit. Do it anyway - to get to the other side. I have this grit in me and saw it in action at Pixar. The stubborn steel it takes for artists to go through the chopper over and over.

Artists are warriors.

My friend Emmy-winning screenwriter, novelist, and comic book writer Marc Guggenheim – co-creator and showrunner of TV series such as “Arrow” and “Legends of Tomorrow” – didn’t have much patience for artists who let the exigencies of life prevent them from pursuing their dreams.

I’m probably the wrong person to ask. I started writing in my third year of law school and developed my craft over the course of four-plus years of practice. That’s 80- to 90-hour workweeks. If someone tells me that their job doesn’t afford them time to write on the side, I just zone out. You find the time. In my case — inspired by an interview I read with Ron Bass — I woke up at five every morning to write for two hours before heading into the office.

You find a way.

My friend screenwriter Harley Peyton, who co-wrote a lot of the original “Twin Peaks” series, was a part of the writers’ room of my “Dracula” TV series and, most recently created and showran “Reginald the Vampire”, had some similarly brutal truth to share on the subject.

The current landscape has never been more complicated for young writers. It is a hard road to travel. That requires a forceful commitment at the start. No doubts, no questions – this is the life you want to pursue. That means leaning into the headwinds, setbacks, and moments when it seems like a waste of time. Because — and it has always been this way for me — there is simply no other way you want to live your life. I know that sounds grandiose. But I think it is also necessary.

There are no half-measures when it comes to building a writing career in the current environment.

There you have it: The secret to making it in this business is grit, it’s wherewithal, it’s a refusal to accept there is any other option for you, and then doing everything you can, relentlessly, to make your dreams come true.

But…

What happens when it does?

What happens when you finally get to call your parents and best friends, crying, to tell them it happened – you just scored your first sale. Holy shit, you’re a professional artist now.

It’s at this point that many people I know began to make a long series of mistakes about how to weather the ups and downs of the business.

For context, I got it half-right. And I got it that because my father was a frugal man, which he learned from his grandfather who came from a long line of frugal men and women of German descent. In other words, I come from a family of cheap asses.

Okay, here’s what I want you to know, based on what I know I did right and what I wish I had done because hindsight made it so clear to me:

Tip Number 1:

Sit down and create a budget.

I don’t mean a boring adult budget with groceries and things like that on it, though they will be.

I mean a budget that defines the bare minimum of what you need to live a life you enjoy and find value in. Work out rent or mortgage, groceries, gas and utilities, phone and internet, and an appropriate amount for socializing, entertainment, and honing your craft. In my case, “honing my craft” meant going to the movies – a lot. And reading – a lot.

But what about vacations? That should be on there, too. Not the fancy stuff, just what you need to say, “I liked being alive this year.”

This is your real cost of living – and it’s the only cost of living you should try to meet.

Never spend more than it ever.

Tip Number 2:

Every dollar you earn beyond your real cost of living goes into a savings account.

Unless it’s an extraordinary amount of money, the kind that blows up your tax bracket, save it, don’t invest it in anything more than CDs of various term lengths. Don’t disappear it into an IRA account for retirement. You’re not there yet.

Besides, if you end up with more savings than you need, later on you can sock it away in IRAs and stocks or whatever else makes sense.

The note behind the note here is: You need cash reserves.

Consider that in Australia, where I live, self-employed people – and that’s what artists are – can aggregate their income over multiple years, causing each subsequent year’s tax burden to be modified to take into account the ups and downs of your professional success.

If you’re in the United States, that’s not the case at the IRS level, but it’s still true to how you should be living your life.

If this year is a good year, next year very likely won’t be. And even if it is, what if the year afterward isn’t? What if your income craters because, say, a pandemic?

An artist’s income is measured in years, is my point – not a single year.

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Tip Number 3:

Invest in your career.

What I mean by this is use your savings to try to ensure that you never have to compromise your ability to pursue your art on your own terms.

This is one of the tips I really wish someone had given me early in my career.

After I found success, I decided to reward myself after a few years. I bought a beautiful house that I could afford at the time, but thanks to a few professional missteps, became a point of tremendous financial stress. As a result, I had to go after and take some jobs I didn’t really like. Those jobs turned out about as well as I had expected they would, which certainly didn’t help me get more work.

By the way, this has happened to so many of my friends. They ended up with homes they have to take shitty jobs to pay for, which eventually reduces their careers to shadows of the ones they hoped to have when they became professional artists.

So, the harsh reality is, had I been living within my real cost of living – rather than the one I felt I had moved into – I would’ve bought a much-cheaper house and never broke a sweat about it.

More importantly, it would’ve allowed me to say yes to better, less-lucrative projects that would’ve brought me more creative satisfaction and likely helped my long-term career much more.

This is another aspect of what I mentioned a moment ago – “invest in your career”. The more financial flexibility you create for yourself, the more opportunity you have to pass on bad jobs, spend more time originating your own projects or pursuing ones that matter, building other streams of creative income, and so on.

Tip Number 4:

In some ways, I think it’s the most important one. It’s certainly the one I wish someone, anyone, around me had told me to do as I built my career in Hollywood. It wasn’t until I reached London and, later, Australia that I discovered how important it was to my career, my creative satisfaction, and my financial security.

Do you have your notepad ready?

Diversify the hell out of how you create art and where you make money from your art.

Maybe I should provide some context here first:

Early in my career, I had a lot of interest from a few comic book companies who wanted me to create IP for them. I didn’t even care about creating IP. I just loved comics and wanted to write them. I had the energy, time, and creative bandwidth, so I thought why not?

But almost every American rep I ever had told me don’t do it.

“It’s a waste of your time, Cole. Why make $10,000 writing some silly comics when you could write a spec we go and sell for $250,000? Hell, maybe there could even be a bidding war and we could make you a million dollars – wouldn’t that be fucking awesome?”

I mean, yeah, it would’ve been.

Except it never happened.

I made a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. I still do pretty well for myself. But the fantasies I was told to chase never really amounted to more than that…fantasies.

The opportunity to write comic books for publishers I loved evaporated as I poured more and more time solely into film and TV.

Here’s the rub, though. When Covid happened, incomes in the film/TV industry crashed. They were already going down, but the pandemic kneecapped and utterly destroyed a lot of careers. You know what I wish I was doing during that stretch instead of knocking on every door in Hollywood and London begging for work to survive the apocalypse?

Writing comic books.

My finances, with my reserves, would’ve been more than fine.

By the time I got to Australia, I discovered an arts culture very different than Hollywood and London’s.

In Hollywood, I was generally told to stay in my lane. If I left it, it should only be to create IP to sell as a film or TV series. The income streams were always limited, as a result.

But in London, my agents told me to do whatever I was creatively inspired by. Their other clients were, writing plays, writing books, writing radio plays, and more – these things all fed into each other, I was advised.

It’s true, too. I enjoyed my most creatively satisfying stretch while living and working in the UK, which also had the added benefit or providing me opportunities to build creative inroads into mediums other than film and TV.

In Australia, they call this the multi-slashie. You might call it a multi-hyphenate artist.

The idea is, you’re an artist and an artist works in many different mediums and many different roles. You do whatever it takes to make your income, pay your bills, and pursue your art.

The more diversified you are, the less chance, say, a Writers Guild strike can leave you unable to pay your bills for a year or more.

The more diversified you are, the less chance a pandemic can leave your family wondering if it will end up moving into your parents’ garage.

The more diversified you are, the more chances you have of surviving the rapidly changing, increasingly topsy-turvy creative industries in the 21^st century.

The more diversified you are, the more opportunities you have for creative fulfilment both during low points and high points of your career.

Tip #5

Don’t fall in love with another artist.

That might sound like a joke, but I’ve heard this from so many friends over the years, I can’t help but say it aloud.

Find someone with a real job, the kind of reliable one Willie envies a little in Beautiful Girls. Someone whose stability is going to also help you weather the downturns. Because if you marry another artist, like I did – and I love my wife, a lot, don’t get me wrong – you’re basically dealing with the same shit times two with the added burden of you two trying to find some way to pay not just for your lives, but also your kids’.

These days, I’m living the way I’m advising you to live, and, while it can be challenging at points, it’s overall provided me a lot of joy and creative satisfaction in life. I’ve 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 podcast, which, thanks to so many paid subscribers out there, I now use to help pay my bills in a decade when it’s otherwise spectacularly terrible being an artist.

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Earlier I said we’d be discussing the question: How do you keep on keeping on despite all the uncertainty and challenges that come with an artist’s life?

I’ve offered you a warning, I’ve offered you tips, and I’ve offered personal stories to explain how I’ve come to these conclusions.

But I have to be brutally blunt with you – even blunter than I’ve already been.

It’s hard being an artist, 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, as some of my friends suggested earlier.

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 if you want any chance of long-term creative fulfilment.

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.

Sadly, I worry there are a lot of terrible lows coming our way in the future. The turn against education and intellectualism extends to the arts. But there’s the changing economic landscapes to consider, too. We haven’t even touched on AI here.

In decades to come, we might look back at the despair so many of us feel right now and lament how much we’d like to have even these shitty times back. But that’s a conversation for another day, I think.

For now, I just hope I’ve helped better prepare you for the artist’s life you’ve been called to. May you find as much joy in it as I have.

Yes, your friends might have more stability in their lives. Yes, they might know when they’re going to take their next vacations. Yes, maybe they know when they’re going to be able to retire—

Actually, that all sounds pretty damn amazing.

Are you still sure you want to do this?

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