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This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world for material to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post by Steven Pressfield…
I’ve always thought that writers need at least two brains to do their work — the writing brain (creative, playful and original) and the editing brain (linear, logical and hardworking).
But according to Steven Pressfield, artists need still one more brain — the entrepreneurial one. In a recent blog post titled The 3 brains of an artist, here’s how he puts it:
“If we are writers, actors, photographers, filmmakers, we are entrepreneurs. We are in business, and we have to think like businesspeople.
“We have to know how to make a deadline, how to conduct ourselves in a meeting with financial people. We have to have a sense of the marketplace. We have to teach ourselves self-sufficiency. We have to be comfortable without an external structure. We have to learn how to trust our instincts when others doubt us or seek to undermine us (or flat-out ignore us.)
“We are not hobbyists. We are not artistes starving in a garret.
“We are the Steve Jobs of our own creative enterprise. We have to be our own champion and our own best friend.”
He concludes by saying, “Artist = entrepreneur” and I think he’s right. If you take yourself and your work seriously, you need to learn how to deal with the marketplace in a way that allows you to continue to produce your art.
It’s not about pandering to the lowest common denominator. It’s about giving yourself the structure and the freedom to create what you want.
And while art isn’t really more important than math — the opposite isn’t true either. We need to figure out where and how we fit in the marketplace.
