When talking with colleagues about your work-in-progress, imagine you have elephant ears.
Over the years, I’ve observed that there are two things that productive, financially-successful artists do very well:
1) They ask for feedback on their work-in-progress; and
2) They listen to and incorporate that feedback into the next draft.
If you think getting feedback on your work is “easy,” chances are you’re not an artist. Making creative work is tough. You’ve got this idea and however good you think it may be — when push comes to shove — you’re never really sure how to feel about it until you hear what someone else has to say.
We’ve been trained in school from an early age to value someone else’s opinion of our abilities over our own. Then we carry what we learned from school into our life’s work: If teachers and parents (our earliest authority figures) don’t like we do, we decide that we’ve “failed.” I’m not saying this is right, I’m just saying this is reality.
The ideals of “success” and “failure” formed in youth become a kind of emotional furniture that we go home to rest on at the end of each work day. Yesterday: Did you collapse on the rocking chair of success? Or the couch of failure, [hopefully] with a martini? Even if you’ve always considered yourself a “rebel,” my guess is that you moved this “inner furniture” into your crummy, overpriced, New York studio apartment and you’re still using it to help you decide how you don’t want to decorate.
Ok. I probably took the “inner furniture” analogy too far….
The point is…making the decision to share a work-in-progress with a professional colleague will place you in a very vulnerable position. They might not like it. You might not like listening to what they have to say:
“That scene goes on waaaaaay too long.”
“You were flat for the entire second movement. This is not the piece for your voice.”
“If you want to convey a sense of depth and connection with the universe, don’t ask your actors to stare off into space for the first five minutes of the play.”
Share your script with a director, and well…they might find out that you can’t still can’t spell the word ‘charachter’ [sic], even at this advanced age. Or that you need so many rewrites it isn’t even worth considering until you can get your sh** together on paper.
But definitely the mother-of-all potential risks: If you share your work-in-progress, you might find out that they hate the whole idea behind your book, your script, your show. That it can’t be fixed with edits. And if they hate the whole idea and think it isn’t worth trying to save, it’s hard not to think they don’t like you.
Because the story came from the deepest part of you – the life you lived or wanted to live; your imagination. You. If they don’t like your ideas, how can they like you, right? That’s sixth-grade lunchroom-level vulnerability, right there. And who wants to go back to junior high?!
The flip side, of course, is that they might absolutely love what you’ve done, and you’ll never know that until you take the chance. A friend shared a narrative essay with me a few weeks ago and I still can’t get it out of my mind. It was a simple, but powerful piece of writing. I learned something about her that I hadn’t known before; and it helped me realize that what she was talking about – being left out by a circle of friends – happens to all of us at one time or another. But she put words to it, and they were the right words. And the only “negative” thing I had to say was that she misspelled Shaun Cassidy’s name in the first paragraph.
Sharing creative work-in-progress takes guts but if you can soldier through it, I think — no, I know – you’ll make better work. When I say that productive, financially successful artists are good listeners, this is what I’m talking about. They share work with trusted colleagues who can advance the work toward its ultimate goal(s).
Think Jerry Maguire: “Help me, help you. Help me; help you.” There are plenty of examples of what can go wrong when you don’t listen to what respected colleagues have to say (Kevin Costner, Waterworld; Roseanne Barr in anything…) but its harder to pick out examples of how feedback made a critical difference in a project’s success. Is that because incorporating critique is such an integral part of good work?
Successful creatives know that they are not in charge of their own fate. They are [usually] entrenched in a collaborative process with multiple partners; gathering feedback and sorting through it, making decisions about what and how to incorporate that feedback to improve each draft.
Ask for feedback has become integral to their creative process: fine tuning the music and lighting cues, using a professional editor to clean up the chapter, cleaning, buffing, tightening, smoothing, until finally…putting on your powder and presenting the work to its first live audience. Not off key or boring; no over-actors staring off into space. And that process helps them create their best work. Your best work is what you want your audience to see the first time, and every time.
One important thing I have learned from my friends is that space matters. Where you live and work contributes not only to your level of productivity; but your general sense of well-being.
