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Stop Being So Hard On Yourself
There is no right way to be an artist. If you’re experiencing burnout, writer’s block, any sort of artistic resistance it might not be a problem with yourself, but rather a problem with your approach to art.
We’ve all got versions, caricatures, of what it means to be an artist in our mind. The starving ones, who live in near-poverty in pure pursuit of art—they’re artists. The writers who sit down to write and don’t stop for eight hours—they’re artists. The uncompromising movie directors who yell at cast and crew—they’re artists.
The simple truth though, is that everyone is an artist: you just have to do the work.
Art doesn’t need to be hard, art doesn’t mean you have to suffer, art isn’t always born of eight hours of work a day. For every hardcore visionary, every Isaac Asimov (who wrote 12 hours a day) there is a John Ashbery (who wrote 4 hours a week).
Stop being so hard on yourself.
If you want to be an artist, or are an artist, you don’t have to suffer for your craft. Art can be fun and professional. Sam and I have spent years of our lives trying to perfect that belief. Every project we start, every publication under our belt, was born from one simple quote: “Serious art is born from serious play.”
We’re here to convince you that Art is Easy: You Just Have to Try.
What to Expect From This Newsletter
This newsletter exists in three parts. One part for you, one part for us, and one part for the icons.
Mondays are for you: we will be sharing a newsletter containing actionable advice and goals that you can slot into your life. These include, but are not limited to: reading recommendations, calls for submissions (from presses and magazines), writing and art prompts to encourage creativity, and the occasional opportunity for feedback from us!
Wednesdays are for us: we will be writing and sharing stories about the artistic world that we find interesting or useful to a striving artist. These stories may be pulled from our own lives and experiences, or stories that really resonated with us that week. We are striving artists ourselves, so we hope that whatever we find interesting, you will, too.
Fridays are for the icons: we will be sharing stories of the artists who know how to have fun. We often hear about the insane writing routines or suffering artists not because they’re the most common, but because they’re the craziest. They are overrepresented in media, and have a tendency to convince us we are never doing “enough.” So we will be sharing stories of artists who had amazing careers who never stopped putting fun first.
Why We Write This
Sam and I are big believers in collaboration. We believe that art is fun. We also believe that art is even more fun when you do it with other people. Neither of us would have experienced the level of success we’ve had if we didn’t have each other to work with. We constantly make games of writing, friendly competitions that encourage us to push further and further into our own creativity.
We are writing this Substack because we want you to join us. In January of 2023 we started the website poetryispretentious.com, where we hoped to share similar ideas with the world. We wrote articles about fun writing routines, crazy competitions we had with each other, and generally just tried to make writing as accessible and fun as possible.
Soon, however, we found that the website felt more preachy than it did conversational. Audiences responded to the work we were putting out, but we didn’t have a sense of community. We want the fun to flow both ways, so we hope that by starting this Substack we can create more than content; we want to create conversation.
All boats rise with the same tide, as they say. This is especially true of creativity. We want to celebrate our wins with you, and celebrate yours with you, too. We hope that we can be even a small part of your artistic success.
Who We Are
Sam and I have been friends since we were five years old, and since day one we have always loved collaborating. In elementary school we would be reprimanded for collaborating on projects for school (for some reason they considered this “cheating”). We had always had the dream of a world where you could tackle life’s biggest challenges as a team.
So, in 2023, after a long, fruitful conversation, we both realized we were struggling to remain creative and driven on our own. So we decided to make our childhood dream a reality. Sam packed up his stuff from Colorado and moved in with me in Atlanta, Georgia. And then: we got to work.
Since we’ve started collaborating on projects, making art fun for one another I have published two books of poetry. The first was a chapbook titled Celine: An Elegy, published by Bottlecap Press. Most recently, my first full-length collection of poems is forthcoming with In Case of Emergency Press. I have also been published in dozens of literary magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Door is a Jar Magazine, and Beaver Magazine.
Sam has published his first collection of poems titled Tuesday Morning: Poems, also published with Bottlecap Press. His work has been featured in various lit journals and magazines, as well.
All of this we achieved in a year and half of collaboration. All of this we achieved because we made it fun.
We hope you’ll join us on the ride, and we hope that after reading this newsletter you’ll realize Art is Easy: You Just Have to Try.
