Make Bad Art: Writing Advice, Mythmaking, and the Dark Elephant in the Room

While I've been nursing my cat back to something vaguely resembling health, a whole lot of very unsettlingly, nauseatingly specific things came out about a certain very famous author of dark fiction and how he chose to conduct himself over the last many, many years.

I'm sure you're aware. In our little world, it's hard not to be.

I'm not going to get into the details, they are easy to find if you haven't already. I wouldn't go looking without a stiff drink, honestly. But I've been rethinking a lot of things because of it, not least my own interactions with him over the years and how publishing generally is and is not reacting. The world is overflowing with horrors at the moment; this is after all only one of them.

But one of the weird upshots of these revelations has been that it's suddenly okay to not love one of this author's pieces, or at least you will no longer be dogpiled under a fiery meteor of rage for doing so, something it seems many find catharsis in, and I suppose I am no different. I have no way to really process the horror and anger I feel, but I know a lot of writing that seemed important and lovely and intimate once upon a time feels quite different now.

For me, one of those is the famous Make Good Art speech. You know, the one that goes like this:

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.

In the midst of all the stories coming out, I came across a post by Jeff Vandermeer, made between the Problematic Podcast coming out and the Big Article coming out. Its stuck in my mental teeth in such a strange way.

I don't know why that one steam-venting of Jeff's stuck in my head. Maybe sympathy for another writer, one I've known my whole career, finally being able to say "this always sucked though" without fear of being set on fire. Maybe 20 years of being told the particular writer in question was the One-Stop Shop for writing advice and indeed, Life Advice (and yeah, that's part of why this is hitting so many people so hard--the conventional wisdom has been that he Knew the Secrets of a Good Life for decades) for the poetic and dark fiction-inclined. Maybe because, despite the original aim of this Patreon, I generally give a side-eye to all writing advice, even my own, as my own contrarian self has always found vehemently rejecting advice to be more useful in clarifying the path ahead. Maybe it was always just that contrarian self being a dick. It usually is.

And I started thinking about how much that ye olde Make Good Art essay has always bothered me, even as it approached something like scripture in the geek artist world. I could never really explain why, even to myself. And I think maybe I only can now because this happens to be the speech where he talks about always being afraid he'd be "found out" as an imposter by a knock at the door that would take away all he'd accomplished, a passage which now feels eerie and dark, an almost-imperceptible wink at the camera, even if that's just confirmation bias speaking from the future. Re-reading that bit as people discussed it, everything else that had always troubled me, but which I put aside because he was a colleague, a distant friend, someone who had helped me, someone everyone I knew got big starry anime-eyes about, kind of tumbled in or out or around at once.

Make Good Art bothers me because it's smug. Because it says so little while insisting it's full of secret knowledge. Because it comes from a place of immense privilege, insulation, and comfort. And because its core idea is just flat-out wrong, if it's not completely meaningless, and even a little cruel to the rest of us plebs.

After all, this is a speech, written by a millionaire raised by millionaires, that casually tosses out as axiomatically true that the problems of success are harder to deal with than the problems of failure. As part of the preamble.

Jesus fucking Christ, man, no they are not.

Success has problems. No one talks much about them, and they're complicated. I get it. I'm successful enough to nod along and understand what he means. I just don't understand how insensitive and bubbled in your fairy world of plenty and magic you have to be to get up in front of a bunch of people who haven't even started trying to find success yet and tell them fame, wealth, and triumph is the real struggle.

But then again, I'm not a millionaire, and I wasn't raised by millionaires. I started writing fiction on the backs of junk mail envelopes I got out of dumpsters, with pens I stole from banks, because I was sixteen years old and homeless and I knew if I could somehow find/beg/scrounge $1.10 over the course of a day, I wouldn't have to stay out on the street in the dark. I could get unlimited coffee refills all night at Denny's, which is almost like food if you just annihilate their creamer selection, and if I was writing, I wouldn't fall asleep, so they wouldn't kick me out of the warm.

Success has problems. Sure does. But I sleep in a fucking bed with a full stomach and so does my child.

The problems of failure don't involve the abstract words he uses from the vantage point of having either forgotten or never experienced them viscerally, "discouragement, hopelessness and hunger." And impatiently wanting everything to happen right now. For fuck's sake. Failing at making a career of art doesn't automatically mean you're successful at something else. Guess what, you can just completely fail! (Says the Millennial to the Boomer.)

Real failure is a full-body experience. And I do not mean the story of "failure" he shares in this very speech, which is...checks text...getting published but not paid one time, yet still having plenty of money for bills. The problems of real failure involve the sour, shaky fear that comes with a stomach gnawing on itself day in and day out. They involve literally never being able to practice your craft at all because you can't focus on the fucking numinous after a 12 hour shift, or an abusive spouse, or an ailing parent, or children screaming for your attention. They involve having to just live with the shame of not being able to put food in your mouth or the mouths of your loved ones. They involve being constantly disrespected and exploited by those with money and power. They involve absolutely zero insulation against the worst shit that can happen. They involve not just feeling invisible, but finding it utterly impossible to ever be seen. They involve sometimes, or most of the time, not just having to make hard choices, but not having any choices at all.

And sometimes, they involve very dark people with very refined instincts identifying you very quickly as someone who simply doesn't matter enough for anyone to know or care what happened to you. People who don't just break the fun rules about how to write a story or paint a painting or compose a song or find an audience for those things. They break the big rules, too, just to break you. Maybe part of what happened with all these women comes from that strange inability to see the problems of failure as equal to the problems of success. The successful man's problems are just so much more important and difficult than the problems of women trying to survive on the brink of real failure. I don't know. I can't know. None of us can.

But wasn't he right? Wasn't the solution to that very dire situation I was once in, at a shitty diner three thousand miles away and thirty years ago, sitting with my feet tucked up under me so the staff wouldn't see I was barefoot because someone stole my shoes, to "make good art"? Didn't I get out by doing exactly that? Weren't those junk envelopes my ticket out? Wasn't "make good art" actually pretty useful advice?

Well, no, not fucking really. If you've never experienced genuine starvation, lack of shelter, or profound depression, it's almost impossibly difficult, in the face of centuries of dedicated romanticization of "starving artists," to explain how brutal it is to attempt any kind of creativity when your brain doesn't have enough protein, vitamins, or sugars to function properly and has to fight it out for every calorie with the rest of your body. Or how delighted depression is to prevent you from doing any goddamned thing. Let alone the long, laborious, only semi-rewarding process of practicing a craft enough to develop actual skills sufficient to satisfy the "good" part of the commandment.

Because there's that word. The one that makes the whole thing useless, a faded beachwood sign with pre-distressed cursive at Hobby Lobby. The one that has actually stymied more artists than its elevated.

Good.

What the fuck is good art? Why does it have to be good to be a solution to literally all life's problems? Why is the blithe and pithy panacea not to simply make something? Make anything! Make a shit-ass Play-Doh model of the boa constrictor and light it on fire because fuck that snake. Build a terrible barely-nailed-together scrap-wood monster version of your ex or the IRS agent or whoever the fuck exploded your cat and light that on fire too? Draw stick figures, cover yourself in puce paint and take a running leap at a canvas. Scream-sing off-key until your blood is moving again. Or hell, even Make Bad Art. That's freeing. That opens it up to people who aren't necessarily artists at all. Fuck it. Make some garbage, kids. That lets you do whatever your brain and body and grief and need and fear and hope need you to do and who gives a shit if it's the Pieta, it's yours. And hey! Bad art turns into good art sometimes! But it doesn't have to. It's free of expectation. If the point of the MGA speech is a cute little aphorism to put on coffee mugs that means little more than "draw a picture, you'll feel better," surely the good isn't the central concept.

And good by whose definition? When I was writing on the backs of those envelopes, I didn't have the first hapless, helpless, hatless idea of how to make "good" anything. I just needed to stay awake, so I told myself stories. That worked out in the long run (not even a little in the short run), but it very easily could have gone every other way, and back then, the pressure of that adjective hanging over me would have been far too much to bear. Because how? That was Vandermeer's point, that this kind of diaphanous advice ("Do what only you do best" --Neil Gaiman but also literally every high school guidance counselor) is never actually advice on how to create something of quality, or how to find success, it's mainly advising one to feel good about the speaker and further consume the works of he who is so wise in the ways of art.

It's self-help as marketing. When life goes wrong, "just be awesome at art, bro" feels very off-kilter in terms of comfort, actionable items, or, you know, empathy for the sorrows and travails of other human beings.

Which brings me to my second, and thornier issue. Making good art doesn't actually fix much of anything directly unless you are already successful as an artist. Even the magic art can do in this world, and oh, my stars, the magic it can do, can't manifest much without getting out into the world in front of a lot of people. I think most everyone heard the advice as "make art for yourself to make yourself happy and you'll be happy even when things are bad," but every example in that core passage, real problems made deliberately ridiculous, written and played for laughs, as though husbands don't really leave, cats don't die, debt is never insurmountable, reputations always redeemable, implies that the art in question will make you money.

That's why it has to be good. Or at least, good by the definitions of the right people, because we all know plenty of good art makes zero money and has an audience of nobody. Make good art isn't even Neil Gaiman trying to be a condescending dick of anything of the kind. It is amazing advice for him. It does work for him. Because making good art directly leads to those super super hard (the hardest, actually) problems of success evaporating like mist on the water.

And I am telling you right now, even his present problems will most likely be solved by laying low, staying quiet while people forget, and writing a magnum opus that comes out ten years from now to save his legacy. And as it has for so many men, it will probably work.

But for most people?

Good art will not get your husband to stop hurting you. Not you, or anyone else. It will not bring him back or make him realize what he's done--unless it's successful enough to make a man like that think he missed out on something. And unless your art is already in a position to make you money, it won't help you adjust to life on a single income or survive a ruinous divorce or keep your children if he can take them. Good art will not dislodge your leg from the snake's belly and reattach it, and it sure as fuck won't get you worker's comp or disability--unless the art is out there making money to pay your medical bill and keep you afloat while you look for a job you can do with one leg. If the IRS is after you, it's because you didn't pay your taxes, not because they want hairstyling tips, and I assure you, they will not take a perfect watercolor of the English countryside as payment--unless you are already famous and that painting has a real dollar value attached (see Willie Nelson's famous guitar). Or that art makes enough to pay your debt. It sure won't stop fascism or anything else Amanda Palmer said it would do back in 2016. Good art will not bring your cat back unless it affords you the finest vets in the world and the exploding was relatively minor. (Although it can fix your cat's ear, if the people who like your art are kind enough and love cats enough.) And if someone thinks what you did was stupid or evil...I don't know, maybe it's worth thinking about that for half a second before doing way more of it.

But what do I know?

Yes, making art can sort of save you...fucking eventually. EVENTUALLY! Maybe! Years down the line because it all takes years. Sure, I wrote my way out of a bad path. 7 years later. Because when you don't know where you're going to sleep on any given night or how you're going to eat, your brain starts shutting things off to preserve itself, like long-term strategic thinking, which is a pretty important trick for a writer. When life was going wrong, I needed to get to a place all on my own where "make good art" was a luxury I could afford. Making good art to get over your husband running off or losing your grip on the bottom rung of society can heal you and create something that heals others--LATER. In the midst of trauma, the pressure to turn around and create art of real quality and achievement is just another pain on top of pain. In recent years, I've come to very intimately understand how much art can and cannot do to ease agony. And the only thing I can say for certain is that what it can do, it needs time to pull off.

It bears pointing out that this particular author made quite a lot of good art over the years. So did his wife. She even made art of their agony to console herself when her husband "ran off," just as he advised. And all that good art was the exact thing that drew people in and kept them quiet, kept, apparently, an industry quiet. He could do all this in secret because of his good art. It was his shield. It literally was his solution. And that's why it's so hard to separate the art from the artist in this case--because the art is part of the crime.

I can't help thinking about that waifish broken lost girl I was, how utterly not different from any other waifish broken lost girl whose life had "gone wrong." It would have been so easy for someone with much less power, money, and mystique to take the future I eventually found from me before it ever happened.

Who is to say what good art the women he harmed might have made if they hadn't suffered the problems of his success?

Because once you've made good art...if you do no good with it, it's nothing. It's bait, or a shield, or a solution, or a mask, or an investment, or a bulwark against consequences. It is not itself. It is only its utility, which is the opposite of art.

Make Good Art, a speech so popular and beloved its been published as a small book in several different editions, has bothered me all these years because it's always felt like the speaker was giving advice only to himself, not to a graduating class. A solipsist who couldn't see others as real. A person privileged beyond privilege, who has never hurt for an audience for his work or had to face down the possibility of never finding one, who sees art as a solution to all life's problems because it's all he's personally ever needed. And his own advice made him rich enough to play the ancient game of appearing magnanimous and down-to-earth while exploiting and torturing the poor in secret.

I don't know if this has made all that much sense. Just a commencement address, Cat, don't take it so seriously, it's supposed to be light and cute and a metaphor. Except it's attached to "what to do when life goes wrong." And I'm not sure that it's not an abjectly cruel idea when I consider how many lives went wrong because of the very person who conceived it.

Like many people, I've been very upset by all this. Stories I thought I knew and understood make a different, uglier kind of sense than before. Speeches hit sideways, and you see them as though under UV light, the same, but glowing with new radiation daylight makes invisible.

Or maybe I just really fucking hated that speech and finally figured out why. Because when life goes wrong, make good art is bunk. Life going seriously wrong doesn't often let you. Don't listen to gods or gurus or graduation platitudes. And...probably don't make angels of rich old men. They're never the kind with wings. We are forced to live in their control and by their rules, so we want them to be so badly. We need them to be. But they're not. They're the kind with animal mouths and a million eyes that never shut.

When life breaks, and it will, for all of us, in an infinite variety of ways, triage the immediate horrors, find your footing, and when you can, if you can, just make something. Make anything. Make bad art. Make temporary art. Make crafts. Make space. Make tea. Make community. Make friends. Make love (and it harm none goddammit). Make cookies. Make minimum payments as best you can. Make different choices. Make your bed even if you think it's stupid. Make a scarf. Make conversation. Make up. Make dinner. Make amends.

Make it better. Little by little. Until you wake up one day, and the sun is high, the pain is less, and maybe, just maybe, that knock on the door is the possibility of good art coming to stay with you for awhile.