April 29, 2024
The Importance of Enjoying Your Art
Have you ever noticed those ruthlessly competitive parents who live their own dreams through their children? Don’t you hate it when they approach 7-year-olds’ soccer practice like it’s the World Cup? It’s the same with art: Enjoying your art is the only way to truly become creatively good at it.
You might recall an old post of mine on whether writing skills can be taught. In it, I explained how hard work isn’t enough (and neither is talent, in case you’re wondering). What I didn’t say in that post (not explicitly, at least) was that enjoying your art is a crucial aspect of improving.
All those tiger moms who send their 3-year-olds to excruciating piano lessons or ballet – without even asking them if they like it – are a surefire way of creating technical gods and goddesses who have no goddamn clue what true art is.
Let’s see why enjoying your art is crucial – and how you can enjoy yours!
Yet Another Lesson from the Drumeo Sessions
This is the third post inspired by those Drumeo sessions after the one on confidence and creativity and that on selfish artists. This time, I noticed something fascinating about Dirk Verbeuren, the drummer of Megadeth, while he was playing along to some Megadeth tracks.
He loved every moment of it.
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
It’s obvious from his expressions and overall presence that he really, really likes playing. Indeed, his energy and approach to the entire session is like he’s playing to 100,000 people, rather than in an empty studio – minus a couple of camera operators and the host.
To me, this is fascinating and revealing. Indeed, if we tried to guess what the average person might think, it could go something like this: “Wow, this guy enjoys playing although he’s been doing it for years and is at the top of his game”. But ah! That’s where the trick lies. Such statements miss reality although it’s staring at them:
It’s because he enjoys playing that he’s been doing this for years and is at the top of his game.
Indeed, it’s even more revealing to hear Verbeuren himself talking about enjoying art – this is the same video as above, but a different timestamp:
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
In a nutshell, Verbeuren talks about how in the past he didn’t enjoy playing live, feeling self-conscious. Not only did this affect his performance, it of course also made the whole experience not worth it. So, he realized he needed a mental mind shift. And eventually, he got himself into a different place, mentally speaking. As he says:
Now I go on stage and I have a good time every night regardless […] Some nights it’s really good, sometimes I’m like I could’ve done a lot of stuff better, but I don’t beat myself up over it for three hours afterwards […] I enjoy myself a lot more and I can really focus on just the interaction with the crowd and with the band and just have a good time.
Enjoying Art: Technicality vs Creativity
Let’s here remember an important lesson: Technical skills and creative/artistic skills are two different things. As I said in the introduction, a person sent to e.g. piano lessons since they were a toddler, forced to play endless hours, hours away from experiencing, will very probably become technically excellent. They might become a professional soloist in an orchestra, even.
If they don’t truly enjoy their art, they will never become artistically meaningful.
To translate it into writing terms: Picture the stiff-as-a-corpse literature professor who spent their entire life in the academia, having become technically proficient, knowing the ins and outs of language and literature. Unless they love writing (and most of them don’t; they’ve become too enamored with the system), their fiction would be clinical, soulless, empty. Artistically void.
So how does enjoying your art actually helps with the creative part?
How Enjoying Art Helps You Improve
From a purely practical perspective, when you like something, you do it more often. To continue the tiger-mom metaphor, your own enjoyment acts like a very kind and supportive “tiger mom” that tells you it might be fun to write, play guitar, or draw for a while.
Importantly, if you enjoy your art you also tend to see it as an escape; a refuge. Not only does that reinforce the feeling that pursuing your art is a good thing, a rewarding act, you also tend to associate experiences with artistic expression.
For example, imagine you’ve had a bad day at work or whatever. You come home, plug the guitar to the amp, and vent your frustration. Not only does it help you unwind and alleviate the negativity, it actually does so by channeling it in artistic directions.
Enjoying your art teaches you the connection between imagination and creativity.
How to Learn the Lessons Enjoyment Has to Offer
The word “amateur” has mostly negative connotations today, which is a great shame. An amateur is literally someone who loves. An amateur does something purely out of enjoyment, rather than for monetary gain.
To me – though to you the answer will perhaps depend on whether you’re a writer or an artist – it’s far better to do something because you like it, rather because you want to make money. Money is temporary; art is forever.
Nonetheless, this is an ideal(istic) scenario. In more pragmatic terms, in order to enjoy your art and improve, the key is to focus on the enjoyment part and forget about chasing things. The process is what counts.
Unlike what all the writing gurus try to sell you, it doesn’t matter if you write every day or not. It also doesn’t matter how much you write. You write when you need to, and that’s that. You write when you enjoy it. If you have something to say, write about it.
In our era of “gimme, now, mine, I want it”, things that matter take time. I’d even go as far as saying that time disappears when it comes to enjoying your art and improving. I mean, yes, looking at my own writing progression, I can certainly see improvement. But there’s no end point.
The world-renown cellist Pablo Casals practiced regularly even in advanced age, and when he was asked why, he famously replied: “Because I think I’m making progress”.
So keep enjoying your art, and stop fretting about improvement or “goals”. They come as a natural consequence of true enjoyment. No, not everyone can become excellent. But everyone can become better.
I thought it was a bit suspect (of your mental health, if nothing else) to enjoy your own writing – and have only been admitting that quite recently.
ESPECIALLY when it seems that everything in the world is conspiring to keep me from having a tiny bit of my own brainpower to write the last volume of my mainstream trilogy, rereading the previous volumes – or at times, some favorite (and relevant to the final volume) sections – gives me great comfort and pleasure: I wrote that. If I did it, eventually I will do it again (unless – the fear – I’ve lost it forever), and I can relax and let that happen when the world is temporarily occupied elsewhere.
But doesn’t it follow directly on, “write the book you want to READ,” that you will read it and want to read it because that’s what you wrote it for?
Is it presumptuous to find something you crafted deliberately for your own satisfaction, satisfying? Is it presumptuous to SAY that?
The problem is standards – yours and everyone else’s. Too many people are saying it whose writing I don’t like. I just purchased some books based on the author’s endorsement in their own ads – and I don’t think they’re very good books, though the ads were hilarious!
So I read my own, marvel that I actually produced something like that, and remember that the goal was precisely that: to write the books I want to read.
The heck with the critics – they often couldn’t write their way out of the proverbial paper bag – and they certainly have not written the book they want to read, because, if they had, they would be much happier people and mellow about other people’s writing, and might critique ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ instead of t’other way around.
The goal should be precisely as you described: Every author should write the books they want to read. The funny thing is (as I argued for in this post), that’s also a surefire way of actually getting better.
Art (writing in our case) is not an objective process. To not like someone else’s book says nothing about the quality of that book – and, in reverse, if a book is hated by millions of people also says nothing about its quality, let alone of whether I’d like it.
But if I hate (more mildly: don’t like) something I wrote, that’s some sort of “failure”, in the sense of trying something that didn’t work. It’s still not a failure if I can identify what went wrong and why. To me this is a clear sign that liking what we write is also a sign of understanding why it’s better than some prior work.
I really think Verbeuren’s take is really revealing: Focusing on having a good time is the foundation for practice, learning, and improvement to be placed on.