Creative People Aren’t Good (Part 2)

Last week, I had a few things to disentangle about the commonly-held societal more that being able to make stuff means you’re holistically smart. This week, I need to continue that train of thought to explain the cycle of sabotage plaguing online fandom communities.

As before, I’m talking about English-speaking communities in cultures I can access. I truly don’t know if other communities and other language-speakers are doing the same toxic shit that we are. If you know the answer, please reach out! I’m very curious, and I love thinking and talking about the ways that our culture and language shape us and feed into themselves.

I’m also obsessed with trying to understand exactly how things got so fucked up, why they’re staying that way, and how we can fix it.

Cultural self-sabotage: a case study

Let’s talk about Neil Gaiman.

People who’ve followed my career for a long time, or who know me personally, are aware that I used to really admire Neil Gaiman. I described his prose as feeling like a friend telling a whispered secret story to you in a dark room. Loved the atmosphere of his writing, his mystery-shrouded worlds and complicated characters.

 I’ve reconsidered an awful lot about whether he’s actually as good as I thought he was, but I’m not ready to reread his work more critically yet. (If you’re interested in seeing some critical essays, let me know.)

Obviously, a number of potent allegations about his predatory behaviour have emerged. Some authors and people in the writing world have quietly mentioned that his name was a sour one among the whisper networks. Long before the viscerally upsetting details came out in courageous articles last year, at least some people in the BDSM scene in Australia and in fan convention and expensive professional writing class scenes knew that Gaiman wasn’t to be trusted.

But Tumblr didn’t, and for a while, he was the internet’s beloved English teacher. All of the affection for queer or queer-affirming teaching professionals who saved so many of us from peers’ rejection and cruelty was projected onto Gaiman. He didn’t deserve it, but we didn’t know that.

And how could we? After all, there’s a persistent, clanging notion that to be a creative person is to be a good person. That’s not true, but how did we get here?

Gifts from god

Hang on tight here, because I need to contextualise this shit with cultural Christianity. I don’t think North Americans, especially ex-believers and non-believers and pagans and whatnots, really grasp the power of the background radiation of Christianity. Little turns of phrase represent the way our thoughts and feelings are shaped by this background.

Now, the idea of sainthood is particularly linked to Catholicism, which also happens to be part of my background, but it’s certainly spread beyond that. Like mildew and algae blooming in one corner of a pond, the idea that creativity is a divine gift is casually accepted – and pernicious. (I’m not getting into the Roman roots and how all of that affected the way Christianity developed ideologically because frankly, I don’t know enough about it, and I’m also not sure that it’s really relevant to the discussion.)

“Talent” is considered a gift from god. A blessing. An arbitrary state of being bestowed by deities or fate. Even secular people tend to talk about artistic skills as though they just happened overnight, as though someone simply woke up with them one day, a divine act of reward or caprice.

Creativity is a blessing, so the corollary of that is: creative people are blessed, and blessed people are sanctified, and sanctified people are better than others.

This simple assumption manages to hold firm against every single disproof imaginable. Simply put, we expect famous creative people to be saints, and then we get pissed off, shocked, and disappointed when – surprise! They’re just people. Even the goddamn saints weren’t saints, as any hagiographer will tell you. (I’m not a biographer of the saints myself, but I have a few scraps of passing knowledge.) St Jerome was famously cranky. Don’t even get me started on the Apocrypha, the fig tree incident with Jesus, or any of that.

There was a time when we saw the imperfections of saints and gods as inspiring and relatable, but in the current era, all of those flaws have been sanded away. Some mistakes have a degree of acceptability, but others are too deep to bear. The measures for which sort is which tend to be painfully arbitrary. (Trust me, I have a lot more to say about our internet cultural standards and how fucked up they are, so stay tuned for that in the future.)

What is talent?

Here’s the goddamn problem. Because we see creative skill as a Thing, an inherent quality rather than a gradually developed one, our culture has a very toxic relationship with it. We don’t want to talk about the hours upon hours of skill grinding required to improve at something, and we certainly don’t want to admit that sometimes, people will just not get very good at something they practice. We don’t understand why some people are good at a thing and others aren’t. Some level of enjoyment or satisfaction, plus the willingness to spend time and outlast frustration plateaus, are the only concrete metrics we really have.

But those aren’t sexy and mysterious, unlike the concepts of talent and inspiration. Can anyone grind their way to looking talented? Can everyone do everything if they work hard enough at it? The first one is a maybe, and the second one is too expansive a claim to earn an honest “yes”. That whole Malcolm Gladwell “ten thousand hours” thing has been debunked by a bunch of people more patient and possibly more spiteful than I am. (As usual, misinterpreting and overapplying a scientific study was to blame. Who’s surprised?)

And anyway, repetitive work and practice means embracing failure. Failure is stigmatized here, in the English-speaking Western world, and is thought to indicate a moral weakness or faltering of some sort, so who the fuck wants to embrace failure? No, better to sigh wistfully over the idea that talent or inspiration simply passed us by. Never mind that creativity works the same way as other muscles, including the need for rest days.

Above: my own slow, patient, grinding efforts to improve my drawing skills. Drawing gems is really damn hard.

Who should we be?

The thing is, as I talked about last week, just making stuff well doesn’t indicate anything about the quality of a person.

Let that sink in. None of the artists or creative people you like are guaranteed or even likely to be good, kind, or otherwise lovely by mere dint of their creative skill.

However, that means something rather nice – anyone who’s kind, patient, or otherwise lovely got that way by choosing to be so. Anyone can develop patience and kindness for others. It’s not a god-given talent; it’s a skill that’s trained.

Artists are not better people than the rest of the world – and we ought to forgive them for it, and the rest of us artists need to forgive ourselves for being messy, complicated, mistake-making creatures. We don’t owe the world goodness because we happen to be skilled at something. Kindness and generosity are their own rewards, not the side effects of a skill. Learning to give yourself and others grace, benefit of the doubt, kindness, and help? We can all earn those skills, regardless of whether we can paint a good sunset or write a brilliant string of code.

If you believe in God, maybe this is God telling you to give yourself some damn credit. If you don’t, then hey! Take it from me and my multiple therapists; recognizing your own achievements is a requirement for survival. It’s very hard to be nice to others when you’re busy being shitty to yourself, and not having been “blessed” with a “talent” tends to make people beat themselves up. It’s not easy to stop hating yourself, but just fighting the ideas about what makes people good, important, or generally better than you is a vitally critical start.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook

Creative People Aren’t Smart (Part 1)

 

Another day, another discussion about media where I find myself mildly dismayed by the creative implications of someone’s choices, or lack of thought about said choices. Now, it’s always easy to Monday Morning quarterback things, and god knows there’s no need for the literary equivalent of Cinema Sins. We had that in the early 2010s, it was on blogs and Goodreads, and frankly, I’d rather leave the trend of gleeful dunking and fake outrage in its grave, where it belongs.

But that said, once in a while, I stumble across a piece of information so hard to comprehend that I’m staggered by it. Often, it’s related to a particularly stupid bit of worldbuilding that, say, a world-famous billionaire author who wrote children’s books did. Just as an example.

As I was discussing some particularly nonsensical creative decisions with some friends and colleagues, however, I had an absolutely staggering realisation about JK Rowling – one that applies more broadly, in fact.

Being creative, and good at creating things, can coexist with absolute stupidity.

A defining of terms

Some people are going to read the title of this and fire off an angry post anyway, but lend me a few moments’ indulgence before that happens.

I should probably explain what the hell I mean. I’m not talking about the fake, racist metrics of IQ tests. Developmental delays and birth differences are entirely unrelated to these skills, although they sometimes have an impact on their development.

Stupidity and smartness are actually rather nebulous concepts in English, but here, stupidity refers to a mixture of willful ignorance and stubbornness leading to overlooking things.

In contrast, the particular type of smartness people expect from artists is critical thought, both analytical and creative; in particular, the ability to contextualise fiction and reality.

What’s that mean?

The ability to contextualise fiction and reality can keep you from, say, writing a cozy, sweet book about a magic school with elements based on real-life cultural genocide, for instance.

Stupidity can make you say “but mine’s different!” even when thousands of people are begging you to understand that no, your portrayal of a particular character type isn’t different or subversive enough to avoid ableist harms.

At least in the English-speaking parts of the internet I’ve seen – there’s a cultural idea that being able to make stuff automatically bestows other forms of intelligence. (I blame European colonizers for this.)

But…doesn’t artistic skill make you a genius?

Things like the Masterclass program and TED Talks are particularly pernicious for spreading the idea that people who can make stuff are superior in some way. We often use the term “gifted” for creatives. The problem is, this leads people to the idea that skills in one or two areas indicate skills in all areas or most areas. Sure, people *say* “you can’t be good at everything”, but we sure as shit act surprised when someone famously talented turns out to be skilled at one thing and terrible at another.

The truth is, the ability to create something isn’t the same as the ability to understand either the act of creation itself or the context of that creation. Analysing your own work is a pain in the ass, as anyone who’s ever had to write either a grant or an artist’s statement will tell you. Part of the problem is that it’s really hard to have perspective on your own work, but the other part is, a lot of people have a drive to create that they struggle to explain.

Now, I need to underline that I don’t want to demean people who struggle with the analysis and critical thinking part of creation. Everyone can’t be good at everything, and as the world of media critics shows, there are plenty of people who can analyse things brilliantly and can’t make things worth shit.  There are others still who can teach and relay skills very well, even when they struggle to apply their own skills. And still others are brilliant at applying creative skills, but can’t communicate their methods to others.

Why bring this up now?

As I look around and try to cope with the rising tide of fascism, I see a lot of people, myself included, searching for leadership and hope. One of the first places we turn to tends to be those we admire. A lot of people we admire tend to be skilled in multiple areas of creation and the arts – say, Brennan Lee Mulligan, who’s a very good performer, storyteller, and roleplayer, among other things; and who is something of an online darling right now.

Don’t get me wrong; I think he’s great, but I’ve also seen the rise and fall of creative figures before, and it’s really getting to me. Lin Manuel Miranda and Hank and John Green were similarly lionized in the 2010s, and when they made even the mildest of human missteps, or even just did things that a few people disliked, it was enough to dislodge them from their pedestals.

So what’s going on there? Next week, I’m going to talk about the painfully human nature of people we admire – and why we, the English-speaking internet citizens, need to absolutely chill the fuck out with our standards.

***

A writer and artist, Michelle Browne lives in southern AB with xer family and their cats. Xe is currently working on the next books in her series, knitting, jewelry-making, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find xer all over the internet: *Website * Amazon * Substack * Patreon * Ko-fi * Instagram * Bluesky * Mastodon * Tumblr * Medium * OG Blog * Facebook