This piece was written ‘offline’ during my May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust Creative Time Fellowship. It’s an incredible program for any author or illustrator working in children’s literature in Australia.
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It’s easy to make stuff for others. To assess the market (or landscape), identify the need, then make something to address that need. What’s that you say? Publishers are looking for more stories about the changing nature of masculinity and children’s identity? Great. Here’s a story for that.
That’s one way of making stuff.
The other way of making stuff is to look inwards – assess your internal fears, anxieties, and interests, and then make something to address that need. Solve your own problem. For me, one of those is dealing with the existential issues around human’s perceived separation from nature.
The first way of making stuff is likely to be more profitable; maybe you’ll get published, maybe someone will pay you for the answer you’ve provided to their need. It’s much less likely that someone will pay you for the second way – solving a problem for yourself that no one else but you asked for.
Money is one way of measuring success. It has a fast, sharp, dopamine hit. It feels like you’ve achieved something. The money and contract is a quantitative representation of that ‘success’. But, learning more about who you are in this world, and what you want to become? That doesn’t make it to a profit/loss statement or a balance sheet. For that work, we need a different set of measurements; measurements that are more complex than a number in a table cell. And, there are no standards for this sort of measurement. It’s different for everyone. No one can give the answer to you but yourself – but that’s also what makes it far more valuable than money or status. It’s about playing the infinite game, not the finite one.