Is Writing for a living: a joy or a chore? The Guardian asked authors to share their view on whether writing is a joy or chore for them. The answers relate well to the love/hate relationship I often feel myself having with photography.
Someone should do this for photographers. I wonder if fine-art photographers would be more inclined to find it a joy while photojournalists might opt more towards it being a chore? Or maybe it would be the complete opposite?
A few of the response from the authors:
The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not. I wouldn’t be the first writer to point out that doing something so deeply personal does become less jolly when you have to keep on at it, day after cash-generating day. To use a not ridiculous analogy: Sex = nice thing. Sex For Cash = probably less fun, perhaps morally uncomfy and psychologically unwise.
My favorite quote:
The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is ‘fail better’, as Beckett recommends. The pleasure of writing is in the preparation, not the execution, and certainly not in the thing executed. The novelist daily at his desk eats ashes, and if occasionally he encounters a diamond he is likely to break a tooth on it. Money is necessary to pay the dentist’s bills.
So I then spend a year or so doing nothing until that becomes even more intolerable than doing something.
This is like that first good photo you ever take. If you’re lucky it’s a rush you may experience a few times again in your life:
There’s a place in my head that I go to when I write and it’s so rich and unexpected – and scary sometimes – but never ever dull. I first went there when I was seven and I wrote a poem which startled me a bit because it felt like someone else had written it. The adrenaline rush that gave me was incredible and I wanted more. These days, maybe because I can now access that place quite easily, writing feels like something I simply could not live without.
Related posts:
What a great post, thanks Tim. Interesting to see where the lines between the creative fields (eg. writing and photography) easily intersect. It’s easy for the creative process to become a miserable chore, especially if you don’t produce daily (cash generating) photographs that you’re happy with. Either way, you have to turn around and start the whole process over the next day.
Regards,
erik
If I didn’t get paid to take pictures, I probably wouldn’t do it at all. I would be too scared to. Luckily the fear of starving is greater than the fear of failure. I love what I do. And I would forget that if paying customers weren’t expecting me to show up.
I think the key is balance. We have to figure out how many not-so-appealing assignments a year we have to take to pay the bills and intersperse it with personal work that we find more fulfilling.
If we can find and maintain the balance between essential work and personal work, hopefully photography will stay on the joy end of the spectrum.
Hey guys,
Thanks for the great responses. Wasn’t expecting this at all.
Tim
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