Last week, we talked about how made-up stories can be true, and how “true” stories can sometimes be mostly made-up.
This week I’d like to take a step back and ask an even broader question: why make stuff up at all? And I hope it’s helpful for anyone who really feels like they need to tell stories, but maybe doesn’t understand why.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I read Beth Pickens’s new book, Make Your Art No Matter What. It’s amazing, so I’ve been savoring it slowly, taking in Pickens’s advice about being a creator in the contemporary world.
The reading is also slow because I’m doing a lot of underlining and shouting “Yes!” to myself while sitting alone at my desk with no one to hear it. 😂
As is pretty evident in the title, if you’re an artist, Pickens wants you to make stuff. A lot of stuff.
She also wants you to keep making stuff, even when times are tough or it seems like it doesn’t matter.
Here’s the first paragraph.
This really resonated with me because it put words to something I’ve felt my whole life, but have never really been able to articulate. I remember being in high school and telling a friend that every really good book I’d read had changed my life in some way. The friend responded with something along the lines of, “That seems like an exaggeration.”
High school me backed down a bit and said, okay, sure, maybe I’m exaggerating. But looking back, I don’t think I was.
I didn’t mean changed my life in some 1:1 way, like, “I just finished From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and I shall now run away and live in a museum.” It was more like, I just finished From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and now I can think a little more deeply about families, and sibling-hood, and the role a certain place can play in one’s sense of independence and awe, and how who tells a story shapes what is told.
Permission to feel
Outside of any particular work’s subject matter or theme, I also agree with Pickens that art changes your life because it gives you permission to feel things. Like most people I know, I didn’t learn a lot about emotions growing up. Even today they seem like something I need an invitation to connect with.
Left to my own devices, it’s sort of like, hmmm emotional processing isn’t on my google calendar, so let’s just move ahead with these deliverables.
This is where art comes in. There’s something about a great song or a well-crafted series finale or a beautiful poem that makes space for emotions in a way most areas of life don’t.
The creator is taking care of you. They’re inviting you into a little world they made for a short while, and it feels safe. They’re showing you a piece of the vulnerable things that make them human, and helping you feel a little more human in the process, too.
Why does this matter? Part one.
One of Pickens’s theses is that if you are an artist you need to make art to feel okay. She believes that artists process the world through creating. If they’re distanced from their creative practice for too long, something will begin to feel off.
This means that if you’re a storyteller––whether you’re a writer or a visual artist or a filmmaker or a podcaster or whatever else––you need to tell stories. The need may not be as urgent as eating or drinking, but it’s potentially just as important to your long-term wellbeing, and certainly key to your sense of satisfaction with your day-to-day existence.
If you’re going, hmmm that explains some things about my life, yeah, me too! Not everyone feels this way (Pickens herself does not identify as an artist), but for people who do, making space in your life for your creative practice is really important.
This practice isn’t an indulgence. Rather, it’s deeply meaningful for you and the way you’re hard-wired to be in the world.
So that’s one reason your art matters. Because it matters to you.
Why does this matter? Part two.
Okay, you say, with a flourish of your beret. You’ve got me. I am an artiste and this urge to create is my lifelong cross to bear and FINE I will do it, but this is extremely inconvenient for my work schedule/children’s bedtime/identity as a blazer-wearing corporate badass. But…wellbeing schmellbeing. I need more of a reason than personal fulfillment to set aside one evening a week to sketch out comics that will deeply disappoint me. Or I will be resentful forever.
I get this, too! And this is where community becomes really important. Some people are able to create just for themselves, and I think that’s really powerful and great if you can do it. But for me, writing feels like an act of communication. If no one’s reading, there’s a whole part of that experience missing.
Even without having published a book, I’ve had the opportunity for so many people in my writing community to read and interact with my work. Debuting a novel with a Big 5 publisher sounds great, and I hope I do it one day. But it also feels great to have people who critiqued my work message me to say that something reminded them of one of my characters, or email me to say something sparked a memory of a now-trunked novel I wrote years ago.
And the same thing happens when I read their work. I have certain songs that remind me of friends’ protagonists, many from books that will never see the light of day. There are colleagues’ stories still just sitting on Drive that impacted me more deeply than New York Times bestsellers.
Your work can be meaningful to people without making you a profit or even hitting shelves. In my experience, it’s not about the size of the audience or the fate of a particular project. It’s about making stuff and connecting with people through making that stuff. And enriching your life and the lives of others as you do it.
Returning to high school for a moment…
So I doubted my instincts back then––was I exaggerating when I said that every great book I’d read had changed my life?
Not long after that conversation, I saw a South Park episode (yes, a South Park episode) that made me think about stories in a whole new way. Note: I’m not vouching for South Park. IMO the creators prioritize a sort of early-2000s-flavored shock value over narrative in ways that I don’t find particularly elegant or honest. To me it’s an example of a creative world that isn’t holding up its bargain of making the viewer feel safe. And yes, I know they make fun of everyone, etc etc, but I think we’ve evolved past that as an excuse for intellectual laziness and I don’t really get why they continue to be renewed.
Basically: If you want to watch a cartoon, please watch She-Ra and the Princesses of Power instead. It is for children, but also for everyone, and you will not regret it.
Anyway. This one South Park scene really stuck with me, which is why I’m reluctantly referencing it here. In the episode, Cartman and Kyle break into the Pentagon to stop higher-ups from nuking “Imaginationland,” a place where a bunch of fictional characters live (long story). The Pentagon official asks why the boys care about the imminent nuking so much, if no one in Imaginationland is even “real” anyway. Kyle answers that he thinks the fictional characters are real, in a way.
“Think about it,” Kyle says. “Haven’t Luke Skywalker and Santa Claus affected your lives more than most ‘real’ people in this room?”
He goes on to say, “They’ve changed my life. Changed the way I act on the earth. Doesn’t that make them kind of real?”
This speech, and the emotional music and subsequent cheesy slow clap that accompany it, blew my 18-year-old mind. Though the extended list of characters who changed my life would probably include some women, unlike Kyle’s, the idea behind what he’s saying makes so much sense. And I’m glad my 18-year-old self got to hear that.
Something doesn’t have to be real to be important. Making stuff up can be deeply vital work. Great art changes lives.
If you’re an artist, you need to make art. And the world needs you to make it, too.
Happy storytelling.
–Erin
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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