Loving The Fight, Pt. 1: The Playground
Artists & writers have no choice but to fight, every day of their lives.
The playground is where the fight begins. It’s where we get our first taste of the fight. The fight isn’t on the page or the canvas, it’s not in the camera or the computer. It’s out there in the dirt, where we first fall in love with the fight.
When we are children, we play, but nobody tells us what to play or how. We just have fun, preferably with some friends. And in the process of having fun, our brains ensure that we learn how to get or keep what’s ours, how to approach a line in the sand without fear, how to take from others and keep it from them, how to protect the vulnerable goal, how to overcome the obstacles in our way, how to stay alive, to not get tagged. We play to fight and a lot of times the fight is the play. Every playground action is a life-or-death negotiation, played by children who are slowly shedding, day by day, the trappings of psychopathy in the arena of civilized sport.1
Nearly all of our playground games involve winning and losing, the thrill of the match, the discovery of rules that either level the playing field or give us a distinct advantage. Even games of make believe involve cooperating with a team, fighting invisible enemies, and challenging the physicality of the world around.
If we found ourselves perpetually losing these playground games, we looked for other ways to succeed, by hook or crook, fair or foul. This is the choice: improve our skills when our friends are not around, or quit altogether in anger and frustration. We pick up the bat, set down the ball, decide in split seconds that it is or isn't worth the effort it would take to get good enough to win or deal with losing in a dignified manner. And some us decide to never play again.
Grown Ups All Growed Up Now
Later—as adults—we decide what games we play, each with their own levels of risk and exposure, all within the limits of our perceived threshold for pain or our tolerance for humiliation and rejection, and whether or not we call these things “humiliation” and “rejection” rather than another species of victory.
If you want to play the writer’s game, you have to write. You want to paint? Paint. But further: do you want to play the writer’s game alone, paint alone, sing alone, or do you want someone to read what you wrote, see what you saw, hear the song in your head? Then it just became a fight.
This is the human choice: to fight or not to fight. If the playground is for exploration, for learning the rules we’ll apply as adults, then the only thing to reject you is what doesn’t lie buried beneath the wood chips. If the playground is for casual games of catch, you’ll get some low effort cardio, pleasant conversation, and nothing to talk about on the walk back home. But if you choose to fight, and your chin’s at risk of a knockout punch, well, that’s a choice you’re gonna think about later.
The fight for the artist and writer is against those who can and will reject you, reject your ideas, reject your declarations. And if you choose a life that avoids rejection, you’ve already been rejected.
If you choose a life of monk-like solitude, you’ll need to find another monk to read your works, but monks have other things to do, other saints to adore.
So if you then complain that “nobody reads my writing” but you didn’t give it to anyone outside the first couple rings of your inner circle, then that’s on you.2 You chose isolation. Nobody can ignore what isn’t there. The algorithms aren't lining up against you.3
Payment Not Guaranteed
This is a different age, a different time from all those writers of the 20th century whom you heard could write a story and get paid by the word, hold actual jobs as writers, who scorned any writer who wrote for no pay. Rare then, they are even rarer now, H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson, all the pulp writers you can name off the top of your head got paid by somebody who depended on their words for advertising dollars, and maybe those guys wouldn’t write for less than a penny a word, but if that’s the case, a lot of them wouldn’t bother writing today.
It’s a different age from when skilled illustrators could fill seats in studios surrounded by other illustrators, inking boards, blue-lining ideas, goofing around, and getting the job done. Animators, comic book artists, letterers, inkers, all of them were once valued craftsmen and artists who could produce on demand and support their families. There are still a lot of skilled people out there, but they won’t get paid by the page.
Unless you start a zine and print it out, distributing it locally, your playground as an artist and writer is likely the internet. All you have to do is figure out how to make a Search Result put you at the top of the list instead of a dozen other nobodies who are doing the same thing as you, writing with the same words as you, painting with the same box of paints, in their own little corner of the internet, dreaming, like you, of long tails and publishing advances, groupies and book readings, independent bookstores and best-seller lists, digging all the while in the wood chips, happy that their fingernails testify to the hard play.
At the end of the day, when we’re called in for dinner, we walk off the playground dirty, a little sore, but full of the life that rushed through every kid who played with us. Other things are before us, and when we walk through the back door, we slip off our shoes, and forget all about it. But it’s there in the back of our head, preparing us for what comes next… The Opponent.
Parents absent from the playground are a godsend.
Guilty as charged.
Hell, the algorithms want you to succeed more than you do, since they only stand to profit from all us monkeys sitting in front of typewriters, our smocks dirty with spilled paints, our ears ringing with the sounds of music composed and played at dangerous volume levels. They want our suffering to abate just long enough that we can take the time to fill their coffers with our output. And that’s okay. But it's your fault if you don't give them the chance to help you.