Creative Authenticity: When Selling Out Isn’t Really Selling Out

By Dan Goodwin

Everyone wants to be more creative. Don’t they?

Wouldn’t you love to be able to create more, to increase the volume of your creative output?

Wouldn’t you love to be able to create 3 or 5 times as much this month as you did last month?

Your answer is probably “YES!”. But the amount you create is only a tiny part of how creative you really are.

Say for example you’ve written a saga of 5 stories. You’re really proud of each of them, you’ve poured all you have into them and feel they’re the truest and deepest expression of your talent you’ve yet created.

But despite approaching dozens of potential publishers, you’ve had absolutely no interest.

Then you write something in a weekend, something that in your mind is a short lightweight piece of throwaway fiction. Thinking you’ve got nothing to lose, you send this to a few publishers. And they love it! They ask how many others like this have you got stashed away?

Of course you have none, but write another 2 the next weekend. And another 3 during the following week. Pretty soon, your output is at a steady 5 or 6 short stories a week.

And every one is being snapped up and published in various magazines and websites over the world.

You’re happy your work is being published, but then a few months in, come across your original saga of 5 stories.

The stories that were completely and authentically you. Just a couple of sentences of these stories mean more to you — and say more about the real creative you — than all those stories that have been published since.

Where did the real creative you go? And where did this prolific writer appear from, the one who’s churning out story after story of lightweight fiction with ease?

The decision you have to make is whether “selling out” is really “selling out”.

Remember though this needn’t be a choice of one or the other, the authentic artist with 5 unpublished stories versus the prolific author of dozens of published short works of fiction. You can, if you choose to, have both.

Each serves a different purpose. The stories like your original 5 are the kind of works you have to create. You can express yourself through this kind of creating in a way that nothing else comes close to.

The popular stories serve a different purpose.

They provide with income that can support your creative life. They also keep you writing.

Isn’t it better to be writing something than nothing at all?

And they’re providing you with a taste of publishing success and experience that can only be valuable to you when seeking a publisher for your other creative work.

You could see the popular stories as your “creative day job”. It’s not creating exactly what you want, no. But it is providing you with a way to support your true creative desires.

And, in fact, as long as you continue to explore the creativity that IS deeply, authentically you, maybe this is actually the ideal situation after all?

What are your experiences of this kind of dilemma? Having work you’ve produced lead to some exposure and income, while the creative work that’s the REAL expression of you goes unnoticed and undiscovered?

Share your comments, and see what others are saying on the CoachCreativeSpace blog. •

© Copyright 2007 Dan Goodwin

07/10/07