More unsolicited advice on how to make it in the creative world, from someone who has been in the trenches for a while.

Years ago, back when I was single, I was hanging out at a coffee shop with Clark Souter who is a close friend. We got to talking with a young lady who wanted to break into jazz as a harpist. Clark is an amazing musician, and I’ve dabbled at it once or twice, so we had a lively conversation. At some point the topic turned to failure, and at that moment Clark and I started listing our failures. We didn’t just go half-way either. We went hard and deep, as young men are apt to do. Proud to show off our scars as it were. Mind you, Clark and I go way back, so we knew from what we were talking. And we didn’t pull any punches.

What I remember most while he and I cheerfully listed all the big mistakes we’d made, back and forth, laughing the whole time, was this poor young lady’s jaw getting lower and lower. Let me tell you, that poor woman was shocked. I guess she wasn’t used to creative types speaking like that.

In Los Angeles, you get used to others being supportive of you. One of the things I love about this town is if I tell my friends something ridiculous like I want to be an underwater rodeo clown, they’ll reply, “That sounds cool.” And then almost immediately follow it up with something like, “And you know, I bet you’d be good at it too.” Encouragement is common down here, and expected. Sure, I’ve met some artists who aren’t like that, but they’re the exception not the rule. Back in the small town where Clark and I grew up, you’d get a different reaction to that kind of statement. People would say, “You can’t have an underwater rodeo.” Or ask, “Why do you wanna do that?” Or say, “What’s wrong with driving a truck?” Basically, they’ll give every kind of passive-aggressive negative response you can think of. In a small town, the crime of dreaming big dreams is punished because you are rocking the boat. If you succeed it’s seen as a black mark on them. Whereas in a big city big dreams are expected. After all, everyone else came here to make it too, so there’s kind of an appreciation of the struggle. Hop on board. We’re all trying to make it here.

But what Clark and I were doing that day was more than blind support. We were being honest about the process. If you are used to someone weaponizing your mistakes against you, which is far too common in this world (believe me, I have those stories too), then listing all your failures out loud in public sounds suicidal, like you are giving ammunition to your enemies. The thing to remember among friends who are genuinely supportive, is that failure is not a weapon. It’s a tool for improvement. Failure is how we learn. It’s how we get better. It’s how we become professional.

A while back I wrote a post on making it as a creative called So You Want to be an Artist. In response to it, a cousin from back home sent me a link in FaceBook about creativity. The link was to a video that featured excerpts from a Ted Talk by Sir Ken Robinson called Do Schools Kill Creativity?

The talk starts off about children being willing to be wrong at things, much more than adults. Then he gives this great quote,

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

I endorse this part of the video whole-heartedly. I suspect this is why my cousin sent it to me. Failure is not an option in the creative process. It’s a requirement. Often failure is the key to success. Sometimes you have to fail every other possible way before you can succeed. It sucks, I know, but it happens.

Unfortunately, the whole rest of the video is a mess. It goes on to suggest that because adults no longer make mistakes like kids, then obviously we’re teaching kids to be afraid of mistakes. Schools are bad, blah, blah, blah. He even says, “We are educating people out of their creative capacities.” To which I want to respond, “200 years ago, when most people were not educated, did we have a significantly more creative population?” When the obvious answer, “No,” is given, I would follow with, “My brother in Christ, doesn’t that indicate the world does this to us anyway?”

But enough of that crap. Let’s talk about mistakes for a minute. The kinds you want to make, and the kinds you don’t. And yes, I’m going to Not All Mistakes here, because it really is important what kind of mistakes you make. There are wrong ones and right ones. So let’s get to it.

Don’t aim for failure. Aim for success. Failure will naturally come on its own.
My first point would be to not try to make mistakes to begin with. The goal is to try to be the best you can be at your creative task. Just do that and it is guaranteed you will screw up. Trust me on this. Your work can be too rigid, or too earnest; too boring, or too over-the-top. It doesn’t really matter. You will find a way to screw it up somehow. We all do. After all, you’re attempting to get better, and getting better often means first being worse. No one starts at number 1. We all start at the bottom, and work our way up. Succeeding means trying, sometimes over and over, until the right combination of things “click”. By definition, all those previous attempts were failures, they just happened to be failures that pointed you to success.

Don’t make the same mistake twice.
The second point I would make is to try and not make the same mistake twice. Failure is a learning tool. This is its most valuable feature, so learn from it when it comes. “What did I do wrong?” “How can I improve?” These are the questions you should be asking yourself over and over. Again, yes the process sucks, but it’s better than quitting. This is how every pro you will ever meet in any creative field got there. They mistaked their asses off until they got better. You can too.

Keep your mistakes to yourself, and your art.
The third point (and perhaps the most important) is you want to keep your mistakes within your art of choice, and not in your life. It’s okay to be creative in your photography, but not with the money you need to pay the rent. It’s perfectly valid to drop an F bomb in your novel, but not in the emails you send for your day job. It’s one thing to experiment in the kitchen for your own dinner, but another thing entirely when the meal is also for your roommate. Go ahead and eat your mistakes, every good chef does, but don’t expect others to have to partake as well. You 100% don’t get to make your mistakes in the lives of others. This is called being an asshole. Being an artist is no excuse for shitty behavior. After all, they are not the one trying to make it, you are.

Own your mistakes, out loud.
And finally my last point, be honest and open with everyone when you fuck up. This is especially important when you are involved in a group art form like playing in a band, or making movie posters. When others are relying upon you to complete a creative task, pretending you didn’t make a mistake doesn’t make things better, it just makes things worse. And yes, it absolutely sucks when everyone is waiting on you and you keep screwing up.

I remember one time years ago, we were working on a bunch of outdoor pieces (billboards, movie posters, bus shelters, bus sides, etc) for a TV network. They were releasing a bunch of TV shows for a new season, and wanted all the advertising for each show to be unique and yet have a similar design theme so they were “of a piece.” All of them were going up in New York, featured in one place (for a convention I think), and all of it was under an insanely tight deadline. And in the middle of this insane week I was having a problem.

Occasionally we have to illustrate hair on people. Not the whole mass of hair, just the edges, so they look natural. This is part of cutting one head from one photo and adding to another body in another photo. The process is called photo-compositing, and finishers like myself do it in our day jobs all the time. To make it look right you often draw a lot of little hairs that fly away from the main hair mass. The problem I was having is that my hair edges didn’t look right. They looked wrong, drawn in. If done right, you cannot tell that they are not part of the original photo. If done wrong they look like someone let child paint them in photoshop. And that day, at that time, I could not do them. My hair looked like shit. Everything else I could do, but not hair. To this day I don’t know if I just lost my nerve, was especially stupid that week, or what. Normally I could do hair, but in that time and place I could not.

Fortunately I was just a freelancer. The agency had a Lead Finisher on staff, a wonderfully talented man by the name of Marco Blanco. After about the fifth time an art director told me the hair I was doing wasn’t cutting it, I had to go to Marco and tell him I can’t do the hair on this project. Let me tell you, that was super embarrassing. As a professional Finisher I prided myself on doing good work, only in this case I could not. Plus there was a huge financial risk. The client could have dropped me from the project or even from that agency. I only make money when someone calls me, and the VERY LAST THING I needed right then was a hit to my reputation.

Marco was not happy, but he was (and is) a pro of the highest caliber. We worked out a system where I did the majority of the work and then gave the file to him to finish the hair. It was embarrassing, but the work went out on time, and everyone got paid. And I have never had that problem since. I’ve had people ask me to change some of the hair I draw in. Sometimes I’ve had to entirely rethink how to do the hair for a piece, but I’ve never failed like that since.

One final point.
When you pursue a craft for many years, there comes a point where you make less and less mistakes. This is not an outcome (like sir Ken would like you to believe) of an education system or your job. It’s a natural extension of my second point, not making the same mistakes twice. If you try not to make mistakes twice, then after a while you stop making them. You’ve basically run out of mistakes to make. Oh, you will still make them, we’re all human, but they become so few and far between that they are almost like finding a lost jewel. Oh goody, I get to learn something new today.

In fact, the professionals I respect the most in my field go to great lengths to develop ways to reduce the chances of mistakes coming from anyone. They essentially engineer an art workflow that makes mistakes really hard to do, and when they do come up, really easy to fix. Far from showing a lack of creativity, this shows they are a master of their craft, and have a professional’s understanding of the cost of mistakes. Mistakes are allowed to happen, they just can only happen in small areas, and at little cost.

And in a professional environment, this is the highest one can get in a creative field. You keep your mistakes to righty controlled areas of exploration, always keeping a weather eye on the cost.

That’s enough for today. Next time I’ll talk about how I use mistakes in my everyday work.