When it comes to making things, we often ask the wrong questions. We ask, does this have a chance to go viral?
We wonder what kind of content we should make to "connect" with our target market. We try to determine what type of post or picture will get the most engagement.
What we should be doing is making cool shit.
We live in the most creative time in human history. You have more access to the tools to make art and distribution channels to share that art than ever before. You can write about anything, and there's a decent chance that what you write will be read by real people, interested in your thoughts.
But what are you doing with all of these tools?
Are you making stuff that matters, or are you just feeding content to the rapacious algorithms, like tossing a virgin into a volcano, hoping your sacrifice will be deemed worthy so you can go viral?
I get it. We all need to pay our bills. But simply making content for algorithms to boost visibility is a game we can never win.
We live in a world with access to an infinite amount of information. Every day, we consume massive amounts of media. Most of what we consume is fleeting — cultural junk food that we forget once we scroll onto the next post.
If you want to make art that makes a difference in the world, you need to start with an audience of one. You need to make art that feeds your soul. If you aren't excited about what you're making, why would anyone else ever care about it?
And don't kid yourself. You have no idea what will go viral. There are tons of gurus teaching people how to game the system, sharing secrets and best practices, but humans are a wild, irrational bunch. You never know what will capture the popular imagination.
Nobody does. Chasing trends and trying to make a career on the back of one or two viral pieces of content is exhausting and closer to playing the lottery than making a living as an artist.
Writing and art don't have to be side hustles. You can just make things for the sheer joy of making them. It doesn't matter if your art is good or not.
However, art made just for your joy tends to affect other people as well. We can see your joy in your efforts, and it makes us all a little happier.
There is also nothing wrong with making a living from your art. That isn't selling out. What is selling out is when you start making stuff solely for the algorithm. Even if you manage to figure out what these mysterious, ever-changing, quasi-divine entities want, if you create solely for the benefit of the algorithm, your work will lack the little bit of you that makes your art interesting to the humans you want to affect.
What is art, and who cares anyway?
There's a strange paradox where many critics take art too seriously, and most consumers don't take art seriously enough. Artists are trapped between these two forces. Our work and egos are ripped apart as we try and please two different masters. It's impossible to please both consumers and critics. It's impossible to please critics. It's impossible to please consumers.
In the end, the only sustainable way to make art is to focus on making art that makes you happy — art that feeds your soul.
We can't even agree on what art is. I believe in a broad definition of art. Anything that takes creative thought and effort is art. Something doesn't have to be important or have a message to count as art.
A listicle about the top 200 car commercials is just as much art as a Grammy-winning album, if it's made with human creativity and purpose.
Art can be solely for entertainment, or it can be thought-provoking. Art can be as timeless as Michelangelo's David or as of-the-moment as Banksy's self-shredding art.
Making art is part of the human experience. You don't have to be an artist to care about the future of art.
Everyone should write poems, draw pictures, sing songs, and dance, even if they don't think of themselves as artists.
Art is how our species has always expressed our deepest emotions and thoughts. Art is how we understand ourselves and each other.
The critics get it wrong when they waste time comparing pieces of art against each other. Art is not a competition. It doesn't make sense to say a song, picture, or poem is bad or good. Taste is subjective, and aesthetics change over time and from culture to culture.
The audience also often misses why art matters. Consuming art is not just about passing the time or escaping for a bit, although those are perfectly fine things. Art is about understanding something about ourselves.
Instead of worrying if a movie or TV show is good or bad, as consumers, we would be better off considering why we like or do not like certain things. Our tastes can be clues to how we see ourselves fitting into the world. You should never have to justify your tastes to anyone, but you also shouldn't thoughtlessly reject or accept a piece of art.
The media (art) we choose to consume shapes our views of the world. The art we make shapes the way others see the world.
Creating work that lasts means changing lives
As a writer and artist, I want to make things that last beyond the brief period a social media algorithm decides my work should be visible. If I want to make work that lasts, it has to live on in some way inside of other people.
Artwork that outlives the artist only does so because it changes lives.
How do we create work that changes lives?
There is no one answer to this. You cannot gamify lasting emotional resonance. Instead, you have to create work that means something to you as a human being and put it out into the world. Sometimes others will see or hear themselves in your work.
The change you make in someone else can be as simple as a laugh or as profound as a paradigm shift.
The first person your art has to change is you.
My first haiku comics came from observations of my children. One summer, we spent an incredible two weeks at the beach.
I wasn't trying to make "art". I was simply trying to capture something ineffable about watching my children play in the ocean.
I watched as my son sprinted down the beach along firm, wet sand nearest the tide. He left a trail of erratic footprints in his wake that sparkled in the afternoon sun as the bottoms filled with ocean water.
It was just past low tide, and each wave crept a little further up the beach than the last one, methodically erasing the markers of my son's explosive, joyful play.
That was seven years ago, but it already seems like something that happened to other people. Those events did happen to different people.
I'm older and on the other side of a cancer diagnosis and surgery, and a whole lot of life. My son is no longer a little boy — he's a teenager trying to figure out his place in the world and living with a chronic health condition.
At the time, I just wanted to remember the moment. Now, years later, I see I was writing about the transitory nature of childhood and how the tides of time sweep away most of the ephemera of our lives as we become adults.
That simple haiku comic changed my life and continues to give me new insights.
But even more miraculously, that comic has touched many other people. I published it as part of a collection of haiku comics, and I often hear back from readers that it is one of their favorites.
When I first shared that comic on social media, it barely registered.
If I had judged that creation solely on the social media reaction, I would never have bothered to publish it, and I would have robbed so many people of the chance to find their truth in that haiku comic.
I have a career as a writer and poet-cartoonist, not because I ever went super-viral, but because I kept making stuff I liked. Readers became fans one at a time. My career is one of gradual momentum, a stubborn refusal to quit, not of catching lightning in a bottle.
My goal wasn't to make something other people loved, it was to make cool shit I enjoyed making, and that I wanted to see more of in the world.
Art & content
Art is inseparable from content. Search engines, global media empires, and social media algorithms demand an infinite content stream. Content is about stealing moments of attention so that money can be made.
The needs of the content economy seem to be dissonant from the needs of art and artists who want to change lives.
However, art and content can operate in harmony. You can use content to capture attention, and instead of selling a customer something, you can offer them a free idea.
Art that is never seen doesn't serve anyone beyond the artist. Writers whose work is never read cannot change minds. You can and should make art solely for your own gratification, but most of us also want others to see and respond to our creations.
Most of us make art as a way to connect with other people, to ask, "Hey, are you weird like this too?"
What matters to you?
If you only care about making money with your skills, there's nothing wrong with that. But that means you want a job as a content creator, not as a writer or an artist. That means the stuff you make will disappear moments after you post it.
If you want to live a creative life that matters beyond your bank account and your lifespan, you have to discover what matters most to you, and you have to put all of that into your art.
To thrive in this world, most writers and creatives will need to become both content creators and artists. You will likely need to create the marketing that allows others to find your art.
The things that matter to you will shift throughout your life. That's great! That means your art can evolve with you.
Great art has something to say. It has a point of view. You cannot change lives by telling people what they already believe.
What does it mean to make art that matters?
Making art that matters means creating stuff that is infused with your soul. It means making cool shit.
This is why there are so few artists. It's painful to give part of yourself to a project, put that project out into the world, and realize that nobody cares.
I know this firsthand. I've had many books bomb, only selling a handful of copies to my aunts and uncles, and written hundreds of thousands of words that no more than twenty people ever read.
Making art that matters requires you to make your art with the same all-consuming intensity, whether five people see it or five million.
Making art that matters means creating stuff that first changes your life and view of the world.
Every book, comic, and blog post that I've ever created lives inside my brain and soul. They shape the art I will make tomorrow. And even the stuff nobody saw or that most people did not like has changed me. Making all the stuff that I thought was cool, refined my skills and tastes.
My art has made me realize how much I love living a life where my primary focus is making stuff, no matter how it is received.
Living a creative life that matters means you never stop making art. You never stop experimenting. Most importantly, living a creative life that matters means you never stop exploring how you feel about the world and all the people who live here with you.
The world needs your writing, it needs your art. But more importantly, you need to write, you need to make your art. Now go and make some cool shit!
Jason McBride is a freelance writer, poet-cartoonist, and essayist. He's also the author of several weird, beautiful books. His most recent book is "Haiku Comics from the Anthropocene." If you enjoyed this post, you'll love his newsletter, featuring poetry comics about nature, creativity, mindfulness, and living a weird, slow, fully human life.