Art Isn’t Easy
by Fiction Editor Gavin "Action Boy” Pritchard
Image: “The Swirl of Time” by Edward Supranowicz
Instead of writing, I smoked a Marlboro Red at 1:00 AM after watching The Sting. I was being a bit dramatic. I think I was stuck on my day, like a tick digging deep into my brain matter. It felt that every step of my day happened to a different person at a different time. So, I was retracing every embarrassing moment of my afternoon and seeing it playback in my mind like a Rocky training montage. I went to work and spilt an ice coffee on a coworker. I went on a bad date. It was my fault. I kept talking about WWE… and it was not good. I talked to a friend on the phone. We argued. I think it was about copper wire. Or James Bond movies. It was something silly. It escalated. I wasn’t listening to him. I was irritable. I was different to who I wanted to be.
While the smoke entered and exited my lungs, I felt that, in a short span of time, I’d become a worse artist—perhaps a worse person. I wasn’t writing. I was frustrated at the world and my art. All of that energy overflowed and leaked to the people I cared about. Honest to God, I would go on one-man tirades about loved ones in my car only to park and realize the only person I was really mad at was myself. And, as the cigarette reached the filter and the credits finished rolling on my TV inside my apartment, I just couldn’t shake my own childish self-pity. I knew I had to change. So, I confronted my central anxiety. I confronted my desperate need for success.
Let me explain something that I always knew but I was coming to accept as I finished the cigarette:
Art isn’t easy.
It is unlikely our words will reach the front of a Barnes and Noble or the pages of the New Yorker. It’s unlikely we’ll get a wiki. It’s unlikely we’ll be found at a book signing any larger than a local bookstore. We won’t walk the streets of New York and be recognized by strangers. It’s not impossible. In this world, nothing is.
But those larger successes, the ones that ultimately color our daydreams, are improbable. Living off of fiction is improbable. Personally, I know I won’t be as successful as my parents would understandably like me to. Or I will never reach the goals I set as a young writer in the West Tower at Ithaca College.
And it sucks. And it’s okay. Honestly, to be an artist, you have to be content with that reality. You have to look for success. Hell, you need to chase it. But, you also need to be okay with possibly never getting the greater success you want.
Art isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a commitment. Maybe it’s a delusion too. Maybe it’s going on a date, talking about WWE, and watching your date’s reaction when you reenact the Cold Stone Stunner in a crowded Italian restaurant. Maybe it’s about being your unashamed self, even when it isn’t convenient and easy. It’s about being the unafraid you—even when you are terribly afraid of oh so many things. You need to puff up your chest, take up space, and feel free to be free. Your writing is up to you. All of this—it’s up to you. Art, no matter what kind, never leaves. But it can only happen with effort. The world, in general, is apathetic to most art. If you write the next American novel—great! If you don’t, someone else will. This current American identity, in particular, doesn’t want you to succeed. Art is a distraction from work. It is distraction from grind. Art, to our current society, is useless. But it shouldn’t be that way to us. We need to baby our inspirations. We need to carry them like robin’s eggs in the warmth of our hoodie pockets. We need to reach out to the egg when we are unsure, or tired, or angry, or happy. We need to let them grow within our careful hands. And, most importantly, if we see someone carrying an egg too, we should offer to share their load.
Our ideas of success need to warp. You should still aim for the highest honors and awards. You need to enter rooms full of writers and be brave enough to carry the ego of someone who “made it.” You need to aim high, and be okay with not meeting that goal. Small successes are still successes. It will hurt. No one said it wouldn’t. But it’ll have to be enough.
Look, I feel a bit useless to you. And for that, I’m sorry. I could tell you about my tricks for writing. I could tell you my belief systems. I could tell you what works for me when I stare down an empty page like I would a vacant farm road and wonder, Why did I ever choose this? But I don’t want to right now. I think advice is helpful. It’s critical to community. But instead, I just want to level with you. In this life, all you really need is passion. Passion for your craft. Passion against oppression. Passion against your internal critic. Passion to push through the frustration that can ruin you. Passion for art even without success.
I don’t blame those that fold and give up on art. Hell, I might have to for a short period someday. I love writing. But I also want other things. I want a house, land–I want to make someone happy. I want to prove to those that supported me that I’m different from the boy I was. I want to be better than I am now. I want to inhabit the strength I see in some of my friends and fellow artists. But mark my words, even when you leave art behind, it will always be there for you. It’s gonna be okay.
But if you have the time to write, I want you to join me. I want you to lay your worries and frustrations at the bottom of my stairwell. Stand with me and look at the stars and the full moon and let’s talk about our days. Call your friends, family, enemies, lovers. Tell them that you’re trying to change. Or don’t tell them. But let’s agree to be better while also forgiving our past selves. Then, let me give a cigarette to you. Let me light it as you chomp the tobacco between your teeth and you spit the bitter tar of your self-doubt to the ground. Let’s celebrate our future successes (or lack thereof) with a warm beer I left out on my bedside table.
All and all, even though it’s a pain in the ass, let’s do art.
Gavin Pritchard can jump skyscrapers, stretch over rivers, and swing between buildings. He is… ACTION BOY! Oh… he’s also an MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where he also works as a Writing Assistant in the Connors Writing Center. He’s the fiction editor for Barnstorm Journal and a co-host of the writing series Read Free or Die. When Gavin’s not pretending to stop crime in his whitey tighties, he can be found eating cigarettes and talking with his mouth full.
Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Lithuanian/Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet who has had over 700 poems published and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times.