Adding and Subtracting, Writing and Sculpture

From the archives, a year or so later, on continuing to shape a creative career

I originally shared this article in 2022 through Patreon. Some things have changed and settled since then, some things still resonate, and I thought it relevant to share again here. It touches on the ebbs and flows of a creative career as it relates to burnout, finances, and more.

In writing, you begin with a blank page. It is entirely empty and you add to it and add to it until you have your work of art. In crochet, it’s similar, in that you start with only a line of yarn and add one loop onto another until you have fabric, a blanket, a sweater.

Sculpture often takes the opposite approach. You start with a block of everything that you need already there and you chip away at it until you find the art. Michelangelo famously said,

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

I have always been amazed by sculpture – and always felt that I cannot do it well myself for all different kinds of reasons. Mostly I’m amazed by the idea of seeing something that’s hiding inside rather than creating something from scratch. I just don’t see this way.

I am an additive artist, an additive person, really. I am a completist – I start at the beginning of a series and read or watch all the way through to the end, adding each on to the next until I have the whole picture. I love research because I start with knowing little to nothing about a topic and I add and I add until I see the story.

But I’ve reached an interesting point in my life. In writing, you eventually have so much on the page that you have to edit. You have to erase and eliminate and take away when too much is there. I confess, I’m a terrible editor. I love long drawn-out sentences and repetition and saying the same thing in different ways to reach different nuances of it. I admire the poet who carves sentences down into phrases, distills words to their essence. But I rarely read short stories and admiring micro-fiction isn’t the same as really understanding it. It’s certainly not the same as feeling capable of doing it.

And yet … Here I am. Not in writing, per se, although sort of, but rather in life, in a stage of my career, in a place where there are so many words and jobs and phrases and ideas and projects that I’m lost in the forest of too muchness. I must edit. I have spent the past two decades adding on to my work and now I have this huge block and I need to carve away at it, sculpt it, see what’s actually important there in the big jumble, find the angel that’s waiting to emerge from the chaos I myself have created.

When I was in my early twenties, I wanted to “be a writer.” I didn’t have any idea how I would pay the bills with that, and I dreaded having to take on the other types of jobs I’d had until then (waitress - at which I was extremely horrible - daycare and preschool and children’s group home staff, admin worker, trophy builder …) I spent $10 that I didn’t have to enter a poem into a zine contest … and I won first place and $100! That $100 ($90 minus the entry fee) certainly didn’t pay my bills for the month but it was this vital sign that I needed that I could make a living writing.

And so I did. And I was in my early twenties and didn’t ever want to drop another set of cocktail glasses on a restaurant floor again so I took any writing or writing-adjacent job that I could get. I wrote other people’s term papers. Without a degree of my own, I wrote someone else’s masters’ thesis. (Ethics be damned, I was writing.) I wrote music reviews, movie reviews, cell phone reviews, porn reviews (yes, there’s such a thing.) I wrote five billion and one keyword-driven articles on topics all under the sun. I wrote for a plastic surgery website, a nightlife blog, a university magazine. I wrote horoscopes.

Eventually, I had thrown enough different stuff at the wall that I had a resume and I could take on a more select array of jobs in a niche about which I was passionate. And I started writing books – books I was passionate about and self-published, books I was less passionate about for others to publish. I wrote for magazines. And I wrote a whole lot of posts for a whole lot of blogs because that’s where the money seemed to be. And in that process, I became convinced that I needed to churn out content like a machine in order to make a living.

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But that was never the dream. And the dream can always be revisited and remembered and reworked. I wasn’t a poet when I was 21 but I won a poetry contest and it set me on a path. I’ve been taking different turns along that path for the past twenty years. It’s been a wild adventure with peaks and valleys and a whole lot of long stretches of seeming nothingness until suddenly reaching a beautiful new view. Now I’m at this new fork in the road, and I realize that over the past twenty years I’ve accumulated a lot more stuff than I can carry forward with me. I have a huge body of work of all different kinds a varied skill set and a series of things about which I’m passionate and knowledgeable and a network of connections … and I need to lay all of these things out and see what I truly want to carry forward with me and what I can leave on the path now. I don’t have to take it all along – whether it’s a skill I’m good at but don’t enjoy anymore or a belief system about work that no longer serves me.

I need to pause, look at all that’s in front of me, and edit. I need to sculpt. By taking away, I can find what I really need to move forward in the right direction. I can stop feeling, I hope, like I’m going in circles. Maybe it’s more like a spiral?

2023 update: Quitting the bulk of my content-churning jobs was critical to my mental health. It was also critical to getting connected once again to my creativity. All along, I was on this path of writing about the complex relationship between art and mental health - for a decade deeply exploring crochet as therapy before moving into the broader, deeper topic of looking at the shadow side of how mental health impacts creativity. I had been doing the work and loving the work but I’d gotten lost in the hustle and giving myself spaciousness to return to my center has allowed me to find that thread of the work again and really run with it.

Figuring out the finances of all of this has never been an easy part of the job. It has always been tied up with my mental health in ways I both do and don’t understand, some of which I shared recently in my interview with

Rae Katz

of

Inner Workings

. The abbreviated version is that due to chronic mental health challenges, I don’t typically have steady energy, which has meant ebbs and flows in productivity and therefore in income. And then having not enough money is a stressor that further affects creative drive. That can get all tied up in a knotted circle where there’s no clear chicken or egg. This is one of the things I keep writing about again and again because I write to understand myself and in so doing perhaps offer a little light along the way to others. I don’t really have answers, but I keep editing and shaping this life, adding words and opportunities, taking away what isn’t working.