Fall in Wisconsin, USA

A Creative Life?

Recently I’ve been thinking of the link between: living a creative life and being creative to make a living.

Making money doing what you enjoy as a creative person is a reasonable goal and many people are able to do this. But in some cases, for a variety of reasons, it just does not happen. Due to the current economy, some people are not able to make this come about. In other cases, after working in a creative-class type job, people move away from being paid to do creative work thus de-linking the relationship between creative work and pay. Is this a bad thing?

I would say: NO -but how one does this is worth spending a bit of emotional and intellectual energy on.

There can be freedom in earning money from something separate from your creative life --at least for some period of time. The key to success with this is to determine a way to remain engaged in creative work or to make a creative life outside of “work”.

And, how do we make a creative life outside of paid work? By doing things –-the exact things we have always wanted to do --but not for pay. Committing to  “making” outside of the idea of paid work can free us up in many ways. Our creative lives can become our own with this approach.  For designers this means moving away from client based projects to finding our own muse to some degree and remaining committed to our vision. For procrastinators this requires a significant commitment to focus and work on things that may not have a traditional deadline.

For writers this requires: writing (even if its just an exercise to keep the words moving). For designers this means working on something you will most likely not be paid for (examples: revisiting a project that will never be built, making something that you want to make: take pictures, look at how people come and go, dig out your paint brushes).  

Making a decision to take away the link between your creative life and money may be liberating to some and frightening to others but thinking about it is probably useful for all of us.