“What do you do for a living?” Every musician hears that question. People who work outside the arts often have difficulty believing that one can spend one’s days productively in the arts and produce enough of a paycheck to cover life’s necessities. There are lots of reasons that a person might have difficulty envisioning the “professional” side of a professional musician. The foremost, and most mundane, reason is simple unfamiliarity. There aren’t a lot of professional musicians, proportionate to the entire population, and they tend to circulate socially primarily among themselves. So a great many people simply don’t know any professional musicians. But another important factor in this common incredulity, and more telling about us and our society, is the fact that, to most people (including a lot of creative types) “creative work” seems like an oxymoron. Creativity, after all, is the antithesis of work, isn’t it?

No, it’s not.

To get a creative message across – to write a good symphony, or to perform it well, to make a meaningful painting, or write a novel that connects with readers – all of these things take, in addition to the creative urge and spark that get them going, a lot of focus, dedication, time, and expertise to bring to fruition.

Many, many people have some form of that creative spark. I want to say most, if not all people have it. And quite a few of them who don’t work in the arts, per se, have creativity as an important part of their lives. The disconnect, the fact that even naturally creative people often don’t have a place in their worldview for the concept of artistic work, is that they often don’t personally work at creating – not professionally, and not as amateurs either. So the concept of creativity as the “anti-work,” a sort of natural phenomenon that just happens, that flows effortlessly out of “creative” people but doesn’t exist in most people at all, has a lot of currency in society. This was fostered in the Romantic age, with its overblown images of the creative (often tortured) genius as a semi-religious figure, a once-in-a-generation genius anointed by God to bring wisdom and understanding to “ordinary” people. Picture the famous image of Beethoven, face stern and wise, surrounded by potent thunderclouds, awaiting the bolt of lightning that will, it is implied, soon strike him and impart his next work of genius in a single stroke. Then think of the real Beethoven, undeniably a genius with a rare musical creativity and skill, and what we know about how he worked – how he endlessly revised his ideas, tried different approaches, struggled for the perfect balance and form in his works. Virtually nothing he wrote came out, in his original conception, the way it ended up after he had struggled to perfect it. We also know about his years of studying harmony, counterpoint, instrumentation, etc., and that his finished works, which seem so right, so un-contemplated, so obviously the work of a great mind with creative abilities outside the realm of mortal understanding, owe everything to his mastery through study and practice of the skills of composition.

For a more mundane example, I think of a conversation, years ago, with a friend of mine who is a luthier, on the topic of how to cut a bridge for a cello. I’d done some work in this area myself, and my underdeveloped technique had caused me to settle on some inefficient and not terribly effective methods. “The way I cut a bridge” he told me “is very quick and effective. I can cut a bridge much more quickly with my technique than you can with yours. But…” he added, “it took me years and years to become this quick and accurate.”

Society loves a phenom. An 11-year-old violin virtuoso. An elderly former seamstress who becomes a famous painter with no formal training. A composer of a bygone era who appears to have been born to compose music. These are among the most prominent images that society uses to tell the tale of what it means to be creative. And yes, from time to time a natural wonder does appear among us – but far less frequently than our collective story would have us believe. Most of those erstwhile “natural geniuses” developed their art and their craft through arduous work. The great violinist Midori is said to practice 6-8 hours per day. Grandma Moses painted literally thousands of paintings, and likely studied the work of past masters, in arriving at her signature style. And even the great Mozart was worked to the bone from an early age by his ambitious father before he achieved his first masterpieces.

The reason it’s important to understand that much of our received knowledge about the creative process is wrong is this: many of us have ungenerously relegated ourselves to jobs, careers, and lives very different from what we might have embraced had we only known that our early, clumsy creative efforts were not signs of talentlessness; they were in fact par for the course. So many of us abandon our passions early on when we compare ourselves unflatteringly to what we believe we know about “real” artists. We smile at what we believe is mere modesty when we read quotes of great novelists telling how hard they work to be good at what they do. Surely they’re not telling the truth when they say they work hours each day, that they revise endlessly, that they struggle mightily to hone their communicative skills. So when we sit down with our great idea for a novel and several hours pass without the appearance of a perfectly formed chapter, we figure it’s because we’re just not cut out to be writers, and give it up. Any such example will do to illustrate this idea: creative work is exactly that: work!

Are you an underachieving novelist? An out-of-tune violinist? A dauber whose figures are not lifelike? A cook whose food never turns out as you want it to? And do you wish you could do better? Well, I’m not going to guaranty that you’re a genius who merely needs a few more hours of study; but I can assure you with confidence that the path to doing better is through work, and the path to greater enjoyment too. Hours of trying new ways of saying things; thousands of iterations of scales and arpeggios; hundreds of life drawings and still life studies; dozens of meringues or sauces or casseroles. And an understanding that creativity is not a gift, except in the sense that it’s a birthright for anyone who wishes to exploit it; artistry, that elusive goal, happens when creativity meets craft; and craft, the means of exploiting creativity, occurs when creative people are driven to develop themselves into artists.

Every society in every age has produced artists. The creative urge is overwhelmingly potent. Penury, repressive parents or, on a larger scale dictators, lack of materials – none of these things has succeeded, for any length of time, in wiping out this unstoppable human urge: to create art. We do, however, live in an age in which pervasive misconceptions about creativity have caused many of us to draw a clear line between those we view as creative, and those we view as not creative. Just as every society has produced artists, every society also has its imbalances, its unhelpful paradigms, its commonly-accepted misconceptions. Our society accepts that creativity is rare, and that the few creative people in our midst should, as a whole, just get over it and get a job. We accept that some people just don’t have the strength of character to work, and we indulge a few of them in their creative pursuits. And of course we reward a tiny percentage of them (those fortunate few who capture our attention and our imaginations) hugely – to the detriment, quite often, of their deserving but less-fortunate colleagues.

Here’s my advice to artists, wannabe artists, aspiring artists, art lovers – everyone who wants to enhance his or her artistic life, whether for fun or profit: get busy. Set aside several hours per day (if you’re on the professional track), or at least a few significant segments of time per week, and practice. Painters, practice painting. Musicians, practice your technique and repertoire. Writers, write! A lot! Whatever your creative pursuit, work at it. No matter how natural a talent you are, what you do will improve if you work at it, and you’ll enjoy it more and more. It’s not a sign of weakness or lack of artistry to strive for improvement. Quite the contrary, it’s a sign that you take your work, and your audience, seriously. Do your work, and they’ll take you seriously too.

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