Preface
Most of the time the reason writers, visual artists, and other creatives aren’t yet accomplished isn’t because they are unintelligent or lack talent but because they don’t know enough. Many writers, painters, and other creatives across the globe reading this post are experts. Expert artists differ from non-experts in the knowledge they possess and can bring to the creative task.
Expert creatives have outstanding performances because their knowledge is extensive. An expert’s knowledge is ready at hand to be used and easy for the creative to access.
Most of the mistakes any artist makes are a result of incorrect or inadequate knowledge. If you have the knowledge, you won’t make the mistakes you would otherwise make.
Knowledge guidelines for practitioners in the arts are:
- Absorb as much knowledge of your art, other arts, and of the world as you are able to.
- Stop thinking that talent guarantees success, but do continually add to your knowledge.
- Patiently watch the years of effort pass, your knowledge increasing, and your capabilities growing strong.
Creatives: Older Is Better Than Younger
If you want to be successful in the arts, be older rather than younger. Older is better because most outstanding contributions to the arts are not made by people in their teens, 20s, 30s, or 40s, but in their 50s, 60s, and 70s. Why is that so? The main reason why, artistically, older is better than younger is that to have the ability to do artistic work expertly and do increasingly superior work, the main factor is the artist’s KNOWLEDGE and its PRACTICAL APPLICATION over a period of time that is often long.
That people in the arts generally require a lot of time between their first exposure to their art and their first significant work is well documented. And also well documented is that usually considerably more time must pass before they do their best work. Why is so much time necessary?
It is because artist’s knowledge has to become more comprehensive with time, study, and practice if they are to reach the apex of their performance, make the fullest use of their capabilities, establish their reputation, and reap the highest rewards.
No artist has ever lived –Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Proust, Picasso, Mozart–who had so much talent that they didn’t need considerable knowledge to excel at a high level. Talent is a blessing, but talent alone isn’t enough.
Talent may be given to artists at birth, but knowledge must be earned through sweat and toil. Artists who reach high success like Faulkner in writing and Cezanne in painting put in many thousands of hours of exhausting work and study.
Absorb Knowledge of Your Field
Absorbing knowledge of your field is a requirement of any artist who wants to far surpass “mediocre” and “adequate.” Every art has a set of fundamental skills that must be mastered if the artist is to graduate to expertise. The rules of the art, its techniques, traditions, history, facts, principles, experts’ opinions, experiences of other artists living and dead, and criticisms the artist receives provide a foundation to help them solve problems that have to be solved if quality works are to be produced.
In any field in which you are intensely engaged, such as serious writing or painting, the brain you feed with knowledge just goes on learning and learning and learning and your abilities grow and grow. The more knowledge you have, the faster you’ll recognize related information that’s relevant to solving problems you are facing. You’ll be able to say, quite quickly, “So-and-so handled the problem I’m now facing by…” Acquiring knowledge is what you are doing all the time you’re working at your craft, talking with others about your craft, studying it, taking classes, reading, and practicing to develop your skills.
Set and Pursue Knowledge-Enhancement Goals
You would be smart to set specific KNOWLEDGE-ENHANCEMENT GOALS. The greater your knowledge and the then higher the quality of your works, the more tangible the successes you will have.
Many writers in particular are self-educated and have developed their knowledge through a rigorous learning program they designed themselves. It was only after a period of self-education that American author Jack London became the most popular and successful writer in the world.
London submitted stories hundreds of times before his first success. He realized that he had very little formal knowledge–hadn’t graduated from high school–and needed to educate himself. He got hold of the reading lists of universities and studied them on his own.
The more knowledge that is needed to excel in a field, the more formal education is needed, whether at a university or self-taught. For example, writers must learn from their predecessors, their contemporary writers, their current times, and people in other fields so that what has already been achieved becomes internalized and ready for a future use in the same way a master chess player knows the strategies and techniques past masters used to win matches. You won’t amount to much if you aren’t aware of what has come before you. In his advice to aspiring screen writers, Academy Award winning producer Tony Bill said, “Whatever you do—don’t read any ‘How-to-write-a-screenplay’ books. Just read a bunch of great scripts and let it go at that.”
Shakespeare learned from Chaucer. Proust studied the work of Englishman John Ruskin for six years and wrote a book about him. If he hadn’t done that, it is doubtful that he would have written–or even attempted to write–his monumental masterpiece In Search Of Lost Time.
Following in the footsteps of the greats is a vital route to writing knowledge, and knowledge leads to skills, and skills coupled with confidence lead to success. What helps is an aptitude for learning and learning fast, which I can hardly imagine a person in the arts not possessing.
An artist in one field learning from artists in other fields can be effective. You may wish to make cross-training a feature of your own training. For example, my own observation is that many painters like English artist Janet Weight Reed and Australian Michelle Endersby are also superb writers. They must have acquired that skill somewhere. Hemingway studied painter Paul Cezanne and translated some of Cezanne’s techniques into literary techniques.
Goals you set for increasing your knowledge, like any goal you might set, should be specific and should be programmed–a schedule set up. For example, if you want to improve your short story writing you may wish to develop a schedule to study short story masters Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and Ernest Hemingway and read critical studies of their approaches. Visual artists often select one or a small number of artists and study their work and what has been written about them
Be a Sponge
Let’s hope that your mind is a sponge sopping up knowledge because people in the arts who can acquire knowledge quickly and remember large amounts of it have an advantage when trying to create something original.
Review
In any field you’re intensely absorbed in, your brain develops an insatiable hunger and just goes on learning and learning.
You can excel in the arts only when your knowledge is sufficient to excel. Not before. The person who studies harder will acquire knowledge faster and reach expertise sooner.
All artists benefit from setting knowledge-enhancement goals: “What must I know?” “Where will I find it?” “Who can help me acquire the knowledge I will need?”
You are a better painter, writer, actor, dancer, etc. now than you were five years ago because you have practiced and because you have acquired knowledge. The probability is that your knowledge is now substantial, and you are still adding to it and amassing it, and that your knowledge is reflected in the higher quality of your work.
© 2021 David J. Rogers
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fix. I was writing what should be an easy section on planning what you are about to write or paint. Now planning is something I know a lot about. For years I was a trainer for a consulting company I founded. I trained thousands of people to use the best techniques of planning so they might effectively plan whatever business or career project they had in mind.
Even as children girls and boys who will become writers and painters when they grow up have been told and taught by teachers to plan the work before they begin to execute it. They are taught that in grade school, and in graduate school professors or experienced visiting artists and writers stipulate that every work should have a plan. Planning becomes a habit that isn’t questioned because “everyone knows you have to have a plan before you begin. How else will you know how to proceed?”
Some creatives meticulously plan and think the work to be produced through to the last detail. But some non-planner creatives begin to paint or write without a subject in mind, preferring to permit the work to grow organically and emerge. Some writers, like me, begin without any conscious concept of how to proceed other than, at best, a notion not at all well-developed of what the work should probably be about.
Non-planning Virginia Woolf said that her idea for Mrs. Dalloway started without any conscious direction. She thought of making a plan but soon abandoned the idea. She said, “The Book grew day by day, by week, without any plan at all, except that which was dictated each morning in the act of writing.” Had someone asked her what exactly she was trying to accomplish other than to follow a woman throughout a day she would have replied, “I’m not sure.” The planner- writers are sure of where they are going. Their plan tells them.
The more spontaneous process which non-planning creatives like greats Woolf and Mark Twain (possibly America’s greatest writer) and Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci use to complete a work is contrary to the rational goal-setting, plan-making processes. Following a plan inhibits certain creatives for whom a more spontaneous approach results in better work.
Galenson describes two significantly different types of artists. The “everything must be planned” artists are called Conceptualizers: they must have a full-blown concept of the work they wish to create in all its detail before they begin writing or painting the work. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Herman Melville, and F. Scott Fitzgerald were Conceptual writers. Pablo Picasso was a Conceptual painter. Conceptualizers state their carefully- wrought goals for a particular work precisely 
Once Conceptualizers find the crucial problem they advance slowly with a plan, but Experimentalists move fast without a plan. Experimentalist’s goals are imprecise. They have ideas about what the work will be like when it is finished, but are unclear about everything else until the piece is written, the painting mounted on a wall. That imprecision is how Experimentalists like to work, but it creates problems. Not clear as to what they want the final work to look like, they have trouble finishing works.
Conceptualizers tend to bloom early, often with a striking new style or innovation or great success at the start of their career. They mature quickly, starting very early, not gradually through years of trial and error as Experimentalist painters like Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet did, but rapidly. A young Ernest 
People in every walk of life and in every hemisphere on earth–in cities, on deserts, in towns and villages–long to create something. My nine year old grandson is a talented artist and cellist studying architecture. His six year old sister takes dance and will begin taking piano lessons in the fall. Their forty two year old father was an excellent cellist in his youth and was inspired by the performance of a famous cellist to return to it last year. My wife, is a former cellist, and has taken up water colors and has returned to the piano. I write every day. I have for many years, and when I am not writing I am thinking about it and planning what I will write. We are representative people no different from millions of others with whom we share the globe because the current era is an Age of Heightened Creativity. Little children and women and men of all ages are bent on having creative experiences. They will not let their creative instincts be stifled.
It became a permanent part of your entire being–an idea, a theme, or an image that became a guiding force in your life. You may not be conscious of it, but it starts you out in a creative direction, and gives you a sense of moving steadily in that direction, of heading straight toward something concrete and specific. Making a living in art is difficult and so most artists must find financial security other than in art. But whatever your occupation if you are to be an artist you will define yourself first as an artist, an accountant, HR manger, or English teacher second.
Noted composers and performing artists in musical fields–so sensitive to sound and tone—possess what the Germans call Horlust–“hearing passion.” Writers–particularly poets and lyrical writers–have a word passion (they adore words), and painters adore colors and shapes, often from the cradle.
What is inside the shut door is the artist’s rich inner life from which creative products pour–without stopping if the artists explore themselves more and more deeply. Transformation of what is inside the artist into what is outside is the 
Poet W.H. Auden wrote, “Speaking for myself, the questions which interest me most when reading a poem are two. The first is technical: ‘Here is the verbal contraption. How does it work?’ The second is, in the broadest sense moral. What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place? His notion of the Evil One. What does he conceal from the reader? What does he conceal even from himself?” William James said it is the amount of life in the act of creation which artists feel that makes you value their mind.
Artists must be people of action because their main goal is production of works over which they think and 
Children and adults may drop out, but those who turn to art may well be playing the cello or dancing or painting, only getting better and enjoying their art perpetually–all their lives– with fond 
Andrea, a friend—“Andy”–seemed to reach her peak when she had two short stories published in prestigious literary journals at twenty-four and a novel that sold moderately well at twenty-eight. She didn’t think then it would be her peak, but assumed it was a preview of other successes soon to come. But they haven’t come and she’s been wondering what’s wrong with her.
path to solving the problem by admitting she’s found herself on a performance plateau—in a performance rut.
decides they are different. The earlier work was simpler and more heart-felt and sincere. She realizes that she has fallen into a trap of “showing off”–of trying to impress readers with what a good writer she is and how brilliant she is rather than in telling a story in a simple, direct, “Here’s my work, take it or leave it” style.
She also plans to read biographies and autobiographies of writers living and dead who will inspire her.
From childhood on, there have been moments in my life–and I think you have experienced this in your life too—when I’ve had to perform and no one could help me—not my mother, not my wife, not a friend.
It’s very lonely knowing that whether or not you will succeed depends solely on your own skills, your own personality and character, your own preparation, and your own strengths. Then no one can help you, no one can write the novel for you, no one can paint the portrait for you today, or dance in your place, or perform your role in tonight’s play. You’re on your own, my friend. Will you be at the height of your talent today or won’t you? Will you have it? Will your work be good? Will you be satisfied?
When you write, you’re asking yourself, “Does it sound right?” “Does it flow?” “Is it a good quality?” You’re also “self-instructing.” Self-instruction is talking to yourself to guide actions and telling yourself what strategies you should use. A writer may self-instruct to use more imagery in the story, and self-monitor to count the number of images or tell herself, “My mind is starting to wander. I should focus my attention better.”
Boil your whole performance down to a few statements, words, phrases, or images:
finishing, you’ve developed a bad habit and you’d better do something about it.
start another contrary, more fruitful habit. To break the habit of consistently not writing, you develop the habit of writing regularly. To combat the habit of quitting too soon, you make yourself not quit.
You’re not a child or hedonist, a worshipper of permissiveness and pleasure who doesn’t have any will power. There are many writers who write not the traditional four or fewer hours daily, but put in eight hours a day, much longer than the majority, considering themselves no different than their parents who worked eight hours a day and the majority of the work force who work eight hours daily.
It takes longer to completely absorb yourself in an ambitious project than in an easier, less complicated one. And during that period, distractions seem to come up out of the ground. Any intrusion on the delicate world of a creative mind can make that world disappear. Every intrusion not only robs you of time, but also of the time it takes you to recover. If you set a goal of working a three-hour session and have three interruptions you may be busy for three hours but only do fifteen minutes of actual work. If you try to do four things simultaneously, you’ll probably only finish one, at most two.
Don’t let a 
work that leads to the fulfillment of your gifts over the avoidance of work.
Why what I’m going to say now is true, no one has been able to figure out, but almost all people relax their efforts when they get close to achieving even their most important goals. They struggle and struggle and then seem to get lazy and disinterested. They are like a sprinter who runs fast to the tape and slows down or stops. But good coaches advise runners to “run through the tape.” Whatever you do, don’t relax just when you’re getting close to success, but persist in applying your utmost energy
Why are you and I so afraid of failure? Many people live in terror of it and feel they must never fail, but always succeed, trailing clouds of glory. Yet failure can be a blessed life-changing event. If you experience only successes, you come to expect quick and easy results, and your sense of confidence is easily undermined if you suffer a setback. Setbacks and failures serve two useful purposes: Not only do they show us that we need to make changes and adjustments in order to gain the success we are seeking, but also they teach us that success usually requires confident, persistent, skilled, focused effort sustained over time. Once you set failures aside and become convinced that you have what it takes to succeed, you quickly rebound from failures. By having courage and sticking it out through tough times, you come out on the far side of failures with even greater confidence and commitment.
The effect of 
Confidence is needed if you are to be successful as an artist. Make it a point to never lose confidence. If you find yourself losing it, use affirming statements, such as “I can do this; I believe in myself.’
The most successful people have high career aspirations, are confident, and generally attribute their success to high effort and failure to lack of effort.
Creative people who are the most likely to ask for help are those with a high opinion of themselves, while those with a low opinion of themselves are the least likely, although they may be the most in need of it and would profit from it. Asking for help shows that you’re serious about reaching your goals. Useful feedback can help you evolve and reach high levels of satisfaction and achievement.
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