On pushing for a creative life

Having art and writing goals (while doing daily care work and a PhD)

A painting I made in 2023 for some dear friends.

I’ve been writing professionally for eleven years, publishing my work with outlets as varied as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Anomaly. Doing this work has looked like consistently shifting between multiple projects that are often in various stages of completion—being drafted, edited, pitched and, after publication, filed away on my laptop. I’ve also completed two novel drafts since 2016 (more on this below).

I’ve done the vast majority of my writing work as a freelancer, while also holding jobs in service work, care work, academia, and across the editorial spectrum. As a freelancer, I’ve handled the financial aspects of invoicing, setting aside money to pay taxes, and everything else. It can be very easy to get lost in this balancing act between making progress on creative and research projects and the business of staying organized and getting paid. This has meant spending a lot of time working alone, bogged down by the stress of constantly generating pitches and projects, unsure of the progress I was making in my career overall.

Since 2019, all of this also had to happen in concurrence with work on my PhD (still in progress), and since 2021 it has had to be secondary to parenting as well.

Still, around the beginning of 2023, I knew I had “leveled up” in some ways, just through perseverance and luck. Rather than outright “no” responses, I had begun getting rejections from publications I admired asking that I send more work. I was getting waitlisted for residencies and fellowships.

Despite these markers of advancement in my field, I sensed that I wouldn’t get beyond this point. At least not on my own. I decided that I had to get intentional about forming community, and clear with myself about my bigger goals as an artist.

Writing nonstop and publishing everywhere I could had worked well in my twenties. I built up a long list of publications and figured out how I liked to write. As a book reviewer, I learned how fast I could read (not very fast at all). I completed my master’s in journalism and gained lots of tools for doing my work well. I also got opportunities during my time at UC Berkeley to report from countries other than the United States, covering issues that had become deeply important to me.

My thirties—as the decade I became a parent (twice), began my PhD work, and completed multiple book-length manuscripts—have required a different strategy. Everything has become about my long-game. I have started to want to incorporate my visual artistic practice in a new, more strategic, way. And my questions have changed, too. Where should I be submitting work in order to grow my career? Who should I be reading? How should I be budgeting out my time?

When I don’t have time, I paint cute fruits.

With this reframe in mind, in the winter of 2023, I decided to do three things:

1. Make a spreadsheet of all my long-ranging projects (I used AirTable, which has a nice free interface) and prioritize what I worked on while staying cognizant of my overall goals

2. Consistently go to local readings and art events to (hopefully!) make friends with other writers and artists, and

3. Start looking into talks and conferences I might attend to build my craft

It’s not surprising that approaching goals with intention leads to better results, but it is easy to forget to take that step back and evaluate where you are and where you wish to go. Especially—at least in my experience—once kids have entered the scene.

In the year since I made these moves, I have gained literary representation, gotten into a writing retreat (and attended in April 2024), gotten waitlisted for an artist’s residency, had an artwork published and given a related talk, and had my work long-listed in a competition that took entries from across North America.

Looking at this list, I know I need to (and can) get serious about my goals for the next few years and that doing so will bring some kind of progress since “getting serious” means working hard at what I love and putting myself in situations as often as possible in which I’m talking to other people doing the same.

I’d also like to encourage anyone reading this to recognize that when you see a burst of success in someone else’s creative career, it usually is coming to them after years (maybe even decades) of quiet striving. I once interviewed a writer who had written several books before finally getting one published later in life.

January works-in-progress (evidence of a new process I am working out).

Here are the four questions I use to assess my creative life on a yearly basis. If you use them, or have your own questions, please let me know in the chat/comments.

1. What do I want from my creativity?

2. How does it feed the other parts of my life?

3. How can I be more intentional about reaching my creative goals?

4. How can I meet others along the way?

If you’re like me, world events and daily obligations sometimes make this kind of reflection feel superfluous, and creative work feel impossible. When in this place, you might start with something that could be seen as more inherently useful to the learning process. As a way to get started lately, I’ve been making a lot of value studies, color charts, and single object paintings (see the bananas above). It helps me past the initial slump.

A few value studies across media.

Working in this way has begun to feel as important as any of the other things I do to keep myself alive each day. Really. Once I set brush or pen or pencil to paper, I feel myself relax. Reaching this state helps me get through everything else.

Pushing for a creative life means finding ways to both care for yourself and for your creativity, and to consistently (whatever this means for you) create. It sounds simple, but it involves working through a lot—both emotionally, and through the ups and downs of family life, relationships, and side jobs. The push is to keep that urge to make things alive and to believe making things is worthwhile. To believe, in short, in yourself as more than what the other parts of your life require of you (child-feeder, dog-walker, dish-washer, paper-grader—the list is endless).

Hope to hear from you —

s