Creating for fun and profit

(Nimue)

I’m a big fan of people doing creative things for fun. I firmly believe that everyone should have time and opportunity to be creative in any way that appeals to them. We should be able to do things for the joy of it and not in the hopes of developing some side hustle. We should have to feel that the only way to justify hobbies is the hope of turning them into paying gigs.

There is a huge difference between creating for fun and doing it professionally. Not least that when you’re doing something for fun, you can be relaxed about how it goes and what the results are. To sustain being professionally creative you do still need time for this, but it gets harder and more pressured. Having bills to pay can make it difficult to invest exploratory time in creating, and having to force your creativity so as to meet deadlines is hard.

Deadlines are inevitable. If they don’t come from other people, they will come from the need to pay bills. You can’t spend a year working on a single piece with no money coming in. You can’t try things to see what works when you’ve got to have something you can sell by the end of the month. That also means you can’t just work when you feel inspired or in the mood, you have to knuckle down and do it at times when you aren’t feeling it. Again, that can actually kill your creativity if you aren’t careful.

How much are you willing to compromise your vision, your values, what you do and how you do it for the sake of a paying gig? This soon becomes a question. Your passion project may not be marketable enough. There may be no one willing to pay you, or support you as you do it. Patreon helps, but to set up something like that you need to be well established, not starting out.

Plenty of people try working creatively only to discover that it’s a grind. There’s all the business side to deal with, and the issue of selling yourself, and selling what you make. Getting started is slow, not earning enough to live on is a common experience. Coming to hate what you once loved is a real risk. Selling your work can steal all of the joy from the process. Trying to be commercially viable can take all of the soul out of it.

I think a lot of people who haven’t tried it imagine that creative work is just swanning about being self indulgent, doing your hobby and having fun. Unless you have someone who is willing to fund you, or are independently wealthy, it doesn’t work like that. Getting creativity to pay takes a huge amount of sustained effort, and is no sort of easy option. I have no doubt that if more people knew what it was like, it would protect people from jumping into it when they aren’t equipped to deal with the harsh realities. It would also perhaps result in non-creative people being a bit more understanding about the ways in which this is also work.