As a writer, and a literature student, my life is full of anecdotes about people who only became famous after their death, or who had to wade through endless rejections before becoming successful. Any creative person will be used to these little anecdotes, the ones like “Beethoven was once told he was unmusical”, seemingly meant to make us feel better about the fact that good drama and music schools are harder to get into than Oxbridge, that publishers don’t even read all the manuscripts that get sent them, and very few of us will ever make a lot of money or have anything resembling a stable job. We’re told to ignore the critics because they’re a part of life, yet at the same time informed every day of the statistics that clearly show the odds against us. Even the professionals warn that a second job is usually a necessity. I think most of us accept that as a reality
If we do manage to get any of our work into the public eye, it is inevitably torn down by reviewers, editors and people who just really don’t like punk adaptations of Macbeth yet decided to spend an evening watching one. Criticism is just part of the job, and we’re expected to take it and push resiliently through it. We’re not supposed to fight it, unless the criticism strays from being an attack on our art to an attack on some aspect of our identity. If you can’t take the criticism, go find another job, you’re clearly “not cut out for the creative industry”. It’s not just actors and writers and artists who have to deal with this, it’s journalists, presenters, directors, basically anyone in any form of creative industry. “Resilience” is touted as the ultimate attribute needed to succeed in the arts.
But hear me out, none of us are here because we enjoy hearing other people tell us all the ways in which our work is bad. It’s not an essay for school or university; we don’t do it to get feedback. We do it for love, we do it to say something that is important, we do it as a form of self-expression. This is as true of the 99% who never ‘make it’ as it is of the 1% who do. The ones who could cope without this have already gone to work as teachers, or lawyers, or something else with slightly more certainty. Trust me, if we could bear the thought I suspect most of us would go and get sensible office jobs. I’m profoundly jealous of my friends who have nice steady careers lined up for when they graduate. I, sadly, have yet to find one that I can love.
I wish that “I don’t do it to get feedback” always translated into “I am a strong and independent person who doesn’t care what the critics think because I have confidence in my own voice”. But more often than not, it doesn’t. And it shouldn’t. Confidence should not be a prerequisite for these kind of jobs. I’m not talking your standard impostor syndrome, I’m talking about the mental toll of never having any fixed way of measuring whether you are, in fact, “good enough”. A study by Ulster University revealed that people working in the creative industries are three times as likely to have a mental health condition than the national average.1 There needs to be more awareness of this. (This article from the London Playwrights Blog has some extremely good things to say about escaping the “tortured artist” trap, something that I think often holds creative people back from getting help when they need it)
I have yet to work out whether the fact that most of the authors I study as part of my degree spent years struggling with their mental health is because art is a good way of expressing struggles that are often difficult to articulate in any other way, or because of the inherent instability of the job. I’m inclined to think it’s a mixture of the two. TS Eliot never gave up the bank, and I’m inclined to think that was a pretty sensible choice on his part. Many contemporary authors have second jobs as teachers, or theatre directors, or something totally unrelated to writing. I do know, however, that authors and critics (and the same can be said of directors and critics, painters and critics, actors and critics) have been at odds for centuries. It’s a particularly prevalent issue among the less experienced – during my time in my university’s theatre scene I have seen first-hand that there is a certain brand of reviewer who seem to believe that a bad review will get them noticed more than a good one. In an industry as competitive as many media industries are, negativity can seem the only way forward. But what is considered “good” and “bad” is usually a matter of personal taste or, sometimes, a reflection of society’s biases. After all, in the early 19th centuries novels were considered a more “lowbrow” form of literature simply because they were generally written by women, and some of this prejudice persists to this day. “Serious” films are about political issues, war, and other traditionally “masculine” things. Female focused films, or those that centre more on family and relationships, are often written off as frivolous, particularly those aimed at teenage girls. These things are beginning to change, but they have not disappeared
People enjoy some things more than others. And a reviewer is just a person. It’s easy to sit there and be a keyboard warrior, to form judgements from a distance while ignoring the fact that everything created had a creator. This won’t solve our mental health problems, of course. More stable contracts would help, less pressure on creatives would help – in fact, a major overhaul of the way these industries support people is probably needed. But in an industry that’s so hard to get into at all, let’s not tear people down once they do. Acknowledge that opinions are opinions, not judgements on the artistic merit of a piece of work. And stop telling children who dream of becoming a singer, or a writer, or an actor, that it’s impossible. Let’s start encouraging people instead. The ones who can live without their dream will drop it and find another career. It’s the ones that can’t give up who will carry on. And, above all, let’s look after those who already work in these industries. We need them. Particularly now, when the future is so uncertain.
Cadence x
The Literature Lighthouse 