Pay to Play

Austin shared some lovely sketchnotes from a talk on writing as a form of prayer yesterday, and this bit really leapt out at me:

Out of all the interesting subjects they discussed, I think I was most taken by Father Martin’s explanation of how his vow of poverty affects his writing. Martin is “editor at large” at America Magazine, and as he explained it, he basically has the freedom to write about whatever he wants. The same goes for his books: All of his royalties go to the magazine, so he’s mostly unconcerned about sales. […] Writing, for him, is never a struggle.

Absence of pressure as a prerequisite for pleasure. I love this.

I’ve still got Luke’s phrase “financial profit is not possible here” reverberating around my skull from the launch of GOES yesterday, which has me wondering:

What happens to a creative practice when you proactively divorce it from capitalism? (And what form does that divorce need to take in order to be an effective means of culture-shift for the individual and their wider community?)

I think of this as the inverse of those well-meaning friends and relatives whose first words after seeing something you’ve made is “You could sell these on Etsy!” You might as well say “You could siphon all the joy out of this practice and replace it with crippling performance anxiety!”

Who are the people in my life whose response to any nascent creative work is: “Have you considered trying to make this as un-commercially-viable as possible?”

And more importantly: what allows someone to follow that instinct?

Shing and I have talked a little lately about feeling the hustle go out of us in our 30s, and how following the course of that ebb is a privilege earned by hustling a lot in our earlier career days (alongside other factors, of course). Overfunding a Kickstarter or landing an unexpectedly lucrative illustration gig—or even, on a more sustainable scale, running a Patreon—is a means of buying your own creative freedom for a spell, but all of these still involve an initial influx of cash. You have to pay to play.

(The string layer is back on.)

New Talk: The View from Aloft

I have new video up from my time at The Animation Workshop in Denmark, where I was teaching a class on webcomics and social media earlier this month. (This is the first time I’ve had video footage of my public speaking—thanks, Sam!—which is really exciting.) If you’re a person who makes things on the Internet, or a person who wants to make things on the Internet, or a cartoonist, or a budding creator—this probably has some utility for you.

Things I cover:

  • How I ended up doing what I’m doing now (full-time adventure-cartoonist-ing, most days)
  • How social media has enabled me to succeed in crowdfunding, freelancing, and basically everything else
  • What sailing has in common with being an artist (it’s more than you think)
  • Communities and gratitude economies and how they shape our work
  • My unified very vague theory of How the Internet Makes Us Better People
  • What you can gain by giving your work away for free

I had so much fun teaching at TAW, and I hope this talk distills some of the stuff we were exploring and discussing over the course of my two weeks there. If you enjoyed it and want to see/enable more, feel free to check out my Patreon page! I post a ton of behind-the-scenes, nitty gritty, creative-in-the-trenches stuff there every single week, and I’d love to have you on board.