Stop Trying To Be Famous, Popular, or A Cash Machine
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Freelancing, Creativity, Life Lessons, Culture, Writing

I’m big on blocking. Life’s too short for slop in my feed. I excise rage aribeters that offer little recourse or solutions. I block those who are abusive, petty, and cruel. Hate-mongers and hate-readers. Complainers that don’t create. People who call me a cunt in the comments or try to tell me how to do the work I’ve been doing successfully for decades. And while I’ve been quietly muting a disturbing amount of articles churned out by those I refer to as Derivative Peddlers, my patience is paper thin.

I’ve written about our cult of more, our desire to be big when it’s just as noble to play small — some of which has played out in pedestrian writing advice and sloppy self-help, which, much to my chagrin, has become pervasive.

I’m willing to bypass writing advice that reduces one’s work to a sixth-grade book report, but I can’t stomach people that peddle online homogeny. Let me explain.

It’s the equivalent of someone giving you a playbook for painting. Say you’re an artist who barely survived the Gothic art of the Middle Ages. There exists a patronage culture in Florence where the Church and the Medicis decreed taste. Those who had accumulated power and wealth defined genius — told you there was one acceptable way to paint and sculpt. Imagine if everyone followed the rules, adhered to the guidelines and created art that was a bland photocopy of a brilliant original.

How would we have borne the two disparate styles and personalities of DaVinci and Michelangelo? How could we revere Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, his artistic realism and Titian’s lush canvases and idealism?

Why would you adhere to single playbook that purported to define the whole of art? A set of guidelines that don’t allow for risk and individual identity? If we didn’t have artists who broke convention and form, art wouldn’t evolve.

And here we are, centuries later, listening to self-proclaimed experts posing as the Medicis. They’ve made a little money online and now they’re telling you how to paint, but what they’re really doing is cultivating homogeny. Holding your head underwater while you drown in the sea of same. They tell you how to compose titles for your stories and how to write your stories. They warn you against veering from what they’ve defined as acceptable formatting. But you have to trust them because they know things. They’ve cracked the algorithm code and here are their thirteen screenshots of their income to prove it.

As if income defines an artist’s talent. By that logic, hedge fund managers would be the Michelangelos of the 21st Century. As if income correlates to the depth and power a piece of writing has over the reader. As if more means better when all it means is…more. Let’s not ferret out hidden meanings in simple definitions.

The Derivative Peddlers want you to copy them and your writing (and by extension, yourself) is a failure if you don’t. You’re a loser because you’re not making $10,000 a month. You’re a failure because you’re not cranking out 10,000 garbage words a day. You’re a weirdo if you don’t follow the hive because the hive demands you never fall out of line lest you be ostracized and made fun of in their petty stories and vague sub-tweets.

Listen to us, they implore, at the expense of you. All they’re doing is reducing your work to the equivalent of junk food — palatable, easy, and similar to the ten other brands of cheese doodles on the rack.

While I believe in the power of the collective and community when it comes to social activism, economic equality and prosperity, when it comes to art I worship at the altar of own your weird. In art, the individual may be informed by the community, but their art shouldn’t be dictated by it.

Otherwise, rule-breakers would be shunned and smothered. We wouldn’t have artists birthing new genres, schools, and styles because every motherfucker will have a vocabulary of 100 words and copying someone else’s work rather than interpreting and evolving it.

We would have no Caravaggio, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who was influenced by Woolf), no Ben Marcus, no Kelly Link, no modernist, post-modernist art and fiction. No auto-fiction, no abstractism. No impressionism and expressionism. We would be stuck in the fucking Middle Ages painting our pedagogical, baby-man Christs.

I learn the rules of my craft to break them not to be beholden by them.

If you want to make money from your writing, fine, pitch and sell stories that adhere to a publication’s guidelines. There’s nothing wrong with that — I sell work that’s in my voice but perhaps not my style to earn a paycheck. We live in the real and the real requires you to cut checks to people on a regular basis.

But there’s a difference between the work I sell and the work I create because it fuels me, helps me interpret the world around me. Both give me joy, but I’m only constrained by the former, not the latter. And yes, you can make money from your art — binaries are boring — but if you’re making money by limiting your art or reducing it to that which looks and walks and talks like every other kid peddling their income reports on the block, how are you different? If your words and form are locked in a cage, how do you grow?

Constraints are cruel and I refuse to abide by them. If that means I don’t make as much money as the kid down the block, I’m fine with that. If it means a smaller group of people read my work, I’m fine with that. I have zero interest in optimizing my fucking titles. My goal has never been to be mass-market — it’s been to put people’s heart on pause when they read my work. To move them. Inspire them to see the world a different way. To feel part of something larger than both of us. My goal has always been to test the limits of language by using words as weapons and shields.

I could write to conform, to pander, but why would I? To publish my income reports? To tout how famous I am and then get more people calling a cunt in the comments?

It took me decades to detangle my work from the results of the work. I don’t need to be popular or famous when I’m allergic to swarms of people. It took me decades to feel confident in saying I’m an exceptional writer, but I will forever have room to grow. And it took me decades to be okay with not being part of the peanut-crunching pack.

It took me a long time to admit one of my favorite words in the English language is motherfucker. Also, ossify.

Don’t be afraid to be yourself in your work. Experiment with form, voice, and style. Play. Mess up. Make music. Break things and wreck the joint. Approach your work as if you’re a child filled with firsts and wonder. Don’t worry about being likeable or relatable. Don’t swim in the sea of same and be surprised when you drown. Write terrible stories and rewrite them years later. Be okay with the fact that you’re not a content marketer — you’re a storyteller.

Write like you’re holding your still-beating heart in your hands.