The Burden of Being Creative
- slkayne
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
by Sharon Kayne
I started writing my blog in the hope that it would send people to my website and, from there, encourage a few of them to purchase my novels. Also, I was told that a blog was a way to create online metadata about yourself. Metadata, allegedly, drives the search engines, giving them an inflated sense of your worth as a person of interest. Which drives them to drive people towards you. This is yet another bit of advice on how to sell my books online that I’ve utterly failed at. In short, I sell a handful of novels a month. The sales are so slow that, at the current pace, I will earn enough in royalties to cover the costs of publishing and advertising my novels in exactly never.
It sucks being a creative type. I’ve heard the compliments all my life: “you’re so creative,” people say, as though it’s a good thing. As if being creative is as valuable as being smart or good looking. Rich or lucky. It’s not. It’s rather a burden. When you’re creative, people expect special and amazing things from you. And even when you deliver something as special and amazing as you can possibly create, it’s not enough. There is never enough praise, enough fawning, enough adulation to make you feel like you matter. And, really, isn’t that what creating something unique is all about? Saying to the world: I matter!
I loved writing novels when I first started. “This is it,” I told myself. “I want to be a novelist!” Little did I know, the writing of the novel is the easy part. And it’s also the only fun part. Whereas the other part—the selling of the novel—is not only the hard part, it’s also the part that totally sucks. It’s the part that—whether you’re waiting for sales to show up on your Amazon dashboard or waiting for that publisher you’ve queried to break the barrier of “don’t call us; we’ll call you” silence—is nothing short of humiliating. There is no better word for it. It’s humiliating to spend your days hoping people—whether they are complete strangers or are friends and family—will not only read your book but will enjoy it as well.
A therapist once asked me if I could just write for my own enjoyment. I laughed at her. It was one of those humorless laughs that says “are you kidding me?” “Why,” I asked her, “would I want to spend hours sitting at my computer, not to mention investing tons of my creative and emotional energy, birthing something that no one will ever see? Something that will just sit on my computer until I die and someone deletes it?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, but if she had an answer it wasn’t worth remembering, because I don’t.
Sometimes I tell myself that the sales don’t matter. That even the best-selling authors—the ones whose names are universally known—have plenty of time when they’re pretty sure they don’t really matter. I wonder: when they’re lying in their beds at night waiting for the great reprieve that is sleep, do they still feel like they don’t matter? I wonder the same thing about movie stars, Grammy winners, athletes who make more money than god, and other people who are famous for what they do. Is there enough adulation in the world to silence the “you don’t really matter” voices in the backs of their minds? Or are those people already certain they DO matter and that’s what drove them to the pinnacle of their profession in the first place?
Well, there’s a depressing thought—that success only comes to people who already believe they deserve it. If that’s the case, I’m completely screwed. Oh sure, I have moments when I think my creative endeavors are good enough to have value to someone beyond myself. But they are fleeting. They are quickly replaced by the “I don’t matter” thoughts that are the usual backdrop of my brain waves. It makes me wonder if non-creative people simply know that they matter—no matter what they do. That would be nice.
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