The Thursday! Newsletter 1-23: Validation is Not Just for Parking
Volume 1, Issue 23
Let me ask you a question that's bedeviled me for more than a week. How do we artists see our work as valid without external validation?
Before we get into an answer, I need to run out a couple of preliminary thoughts. First, you may not think this discussion is for you because you don't think of yourself as an artist. Don't you worry. You belong here as surely as does anyone who writes for a living or who makes amazing illustrations to pay the rent. You may not be a full-time artist, but if you make things out of your imagination and you have some dreams of those things finding an audience who can love them, then you're artist enough for me.
Second, if you already know the answer to the question, I have only admiration for you because you've solved a toughie. I'm willing to bet you answer boils down to something very much like "My work is valid because I say so; its validity does not rely on any external approval". That, I think, is great. I'm jealous, really, because I can't say anything like that and believe it. Not a lot of people can.
With those two things done, let me say that in all my thinking on this question, I've only managed one answer. It is not an entirely satisfactory answer, but it's the only one that works. Ready? Here's what I have:
Trickery.
Okay, wait. Don't close the e-mail quite yet. I've not conned you, I promise. You have to trust me on this. There is more explanation behind that word but it's important to remember that with validation, as with so many other things in life, it's sometimes necessary for us to trick ourselves temporarily in order for us to get past a roadblock. Our brains like to protect us. Our "inner critic", or whatever you wish to call it, exists to keep us from harm whether that harm is diving to our death off a cliff or a scathing Amazon review.
Our need for validation comes from that inner critic's relentless mission to keep us safe. We make the things we make and we release them into the wild. Maybe folks love them and we get all sorts of wonderful validation from it. We are safe and happy and encouraged. But maybe folks don't love them and they tell us how terrible our things are. Well now we are sad and discouraged and hurt and our inner critic chirps at us like Brad Marchand from the opposing team's bench. We should have listened. We suck. Why would we ever thing we could be more than we are? Sit tight. Stay safe. Don't risk being hurt by the smart, smart world anymore. The third option is that we get silence. Oh, the inner critic loves that silence. It can fill that silence with more than just "I told you so" pesky chirping. It can throw things out there like "See? You're too small for that big world. See? You really can't step into that new role effectively. See? Your stories aren't even bad enough to get scathing reviews. See? Your bland crap isn't even worthy of notice." You retreat. You fall back. You settle.
Let me leave that there and wander to another point. I've read a lot of "how to be successful" books and more than my share of "how I went from a teenage nothing to a bazillionaire in just five years" podcasts. In them, I've noticed something interesting about the people who find enduring success.
They set themselves up for it.
I don't mean they only pick goals they can hit. They don't. They often pick audacious goals. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. He might not make it. He's had rockets blow up, more than once. His Tesla hasn't caught on the way he wanted to. Here's the thing, though. He has more than one goal with everything he does. Take one of his rocket tests as an example. His primary goal may be to launch a rocket to a certain altitude and have it land in a certain place at a certain time. What if that doesn't happen, though? Has he failed? Nope. He didn't meet one goal, but he has another goal or two tucked away that are predicated on the possibility of failure. When his last rocket blew up, his team was already working to learn a brand new thing about what happened. His PR people were already learning how to build more and better buzz about what the company is doing. He missed his first goal but he had other goals ready to do that he could meet. His whole team knows there are many ways to succeed from any one endeavor. See how that works?
He sets himself up to succeed and every success brings validation to him and his company.
Now you. Say you write a story and you send it out to ten publishers, all of whom reject it. You could then say your work isn't valid because no one bought it. Or you could send it out to ten more because you've set up an alternate goal of keeping your work in circulation until it sells, no matter how long it takes (this, by the way is Heinlein's fifth rule for writers). Or you could sit down with the story and give it another reading because you might then see a definite way it could be improved before you send it out again. Or you could go over your list of publishers to see if perhaps you didn't target it well enough (which most definitely happens because not all publishers are always looking for the type of story you write and some of them will be good enough to tell you your story was fine but not the right fit).
Any of those outcomes can be a success for you, if you mean them to be. Do you see the trickery at work?
The real secret to finding the validation you want from your work is intention. If you simply fling your art into the void and wait for the accolades to back out of it at you, you're going to be disappointed. Worse, you'll have wasted your efforts. You work will well and truly be invalid -- sick and weakly, unable to stand on its own. But if you have a purpose to everything you launch, even if that purpose is to make the next thing better, then you have validity. You've given you work meaning. You are building something that doesn't rest entirely on the opinions of others nor on your own steel-reinforced self-confidence.
More importantly, you are feeding your brain what it wants: success. Your brain loves success. It gives your body all sorts of nice chemicals and whatnot when you succeed. If you can't fail entirely because you have other means by which you can succeed, your brain will start chalking up successes like Alex Ovechkin chalks up goals. Your confidence will grow because you are winning and it doesn't matter whether the wins are big or not. This, as it happens, was one of the secrets to Thomas Edison's success. If you set up several ways to succeed, you take subjective measures of failure out of the picture entirely and leave yourself only validation. Your Inner Critic has no gripes, your brain sends out happy signals, and you start to expect success. That's when the big stuff can start to happen.
Remember a while back I talked about Flying Sticks of Dynamite and how the more of them you launch, the more likely it is some of them will come back to you in wonderful and interesting combinations? That's how success tends to work as well. Rack up a few and you get more confident in what you do, which brings you more successes, which makes you more confident and skilled and eager and all the things that lead to achieving the big goals you want.
This isn't happy talk. I promise. This is psychology. We know that confidence breeds success which breeds confidence which breeds success.
So. What are you going to do? Wait for the Validation Fairy to arrive and sprinkle happy dust all over your art? Or are you going to make your art valid all by yourself by making sure it accomplishes at least one of the tasks to which you set it?
I'm good with that second one, but it's all on you. Go get after it!
- - - - - - - - - - - -
What I Wrote and Read Last Week
In "Death to the Darlings", I suggest that it is possible to take writing advice too far.
"Hanging Out the Masks" is the creepiest story I've written in a long while. Enjoy!
Nyan Cat -- the meme, not the actual cat -- is ten years old. I found the story of its origin kind of cool. Jimmie Trivia: I once made myself a Nyan Cat ringtone. I might still have it somewhere...
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Here Are the Arts and/or Letters I Promised
Felsküste im Mondschein (Rocky Coast in Moonlight) by Johann Nepomuk Schödlberger, 1830
- - - - - - - - - - - -
One Last Thing
To borrow a phrase from another smart author, Thursday! is free, but it is not cheap. I don't roll any Patreon accounts nor tip jars yet, but I do have a rather cool book for sale (that needs your reviews!). If you want an autographed copy, hit the reply button and let me know. I'll tell you how! If you're seeing Thursday! for the first time, you can read previous issues and subscribe right here.
If you'd like to talk back to me, encourage me, suggest something you'd like to see or you'd like me to write about, you can always hit the reply button! I can't promise I'll always answer back, because I'm quite forgetful, but I'll read everything you send.