The world is not rooting for you
Hello, friends!
By the time this letter arrives, my period of resting and resetting will have ended, and I'll have begun a fresh new job. But I'm writing this on Saturday, the second of October, and my resting/resetting is not yet finished.
I've been listening to podcasts more frequently, as I mentioned previously. I don't really listen to any writing shows. But I enjoy listening to shows that are about creative people in general, in any field, but particularly in film and television.
Last week I listened to an interview with Ethan Hawke on the Off Camera podcast. If you've ever listened to Hawke chat about creativity, it can be a real treat. I particularly like his point of view because I grew up with his movies, and watched him evolve from a young star on a familiar Hollywood track to someone less predictable, more curious.
In 1996—the same year I was graduating high school—Ethan Hawke's first novel, The Hottest State, was published. Sam Jones, who hosts the show, begins by quoting from the novel:
When you are young, everyone tells you to follow your dreams. And when you get older, people get offended if you even try.
Hawke talks a bit about our culture's need to judge. He tells Jones that he'd found a little success as an actor at that time, with Reality Bites, and that he hesitated to tell anyone he was working on a novel. Even saying the words, he points out, "makes you sound like a pretentious asshole".
When he took the novel to a publisher, someone leaked the book to the media, and the buzz was unpleasant: "Ethan Hawke thinks he's the world's greatest novelist." He related the experience to "being punched in the nose".
But it taught him something:
It was a wakeup call that the world is not rooting for you. Everybody doesn't want you to be Hemingway. Right? They actually want to mock you. What they want to do is mock you.
It's up to you to push through that, he continues. You can't bother yourself with whether what you make is the greatest thing ever; you just have to make it.
It's not up to you to decide whether your work is good or bad. If you think making a documentary is valuable, if you think writing a book is valuable, if you think making a movie is valuable, if you think somebody telling the truth as they know it is valuable, well, then, it's valuable for you. Now, it may not be good...but that's not up to you. You know, the attempt is all, really, right?
Hawke talked, too, about the gap between doing a good job and making something that'll genuinely last:
You know, there's a thing that Peter Weir would say, that the difference between good and great is, like, one twist of the screw. But it's the hardest one to do.
Weir, of course, was the director of Hawke's first significant film, Dead Poets Society. On that set, Hawke described, Weir carved out a large amount of time for pure rehearsal; the whole cast gathered in the banquet room of a hotel to read through the script, interrogate lines, challenge their performances. Many of the actors on the film were young, and this was their first movie; Weir, Hawke said, was teaching them attention to detail.
The passage Jones quoted from The Hottest State, Hawke points out, relates to all of this:
People don't want you to follow your dreams. They don't want it. Some musician—I won't remember who it is, but some rocker—said that the thing we love to see about a guy doing a jamming guitar solo on center stage of Madison Square Garden, letting it rip and just, you know, smashing the guitar, or whatever it is, is somebody who's just going, 'I'm not scared'.
Jones and Hawke discuss what it's like to be an artist, to aspire to create something, without the support of those around you. "Oh, you're going to do that?" Hawke says. "You sure you want to do that?" You have to find strength in yourself to push forward:
To do anything in the arts, you just have to be willing to make an ass of yourself.
All of this makes more sense when you remember that everyone, no matter how successful or put-together you think they are, is totally just winging it all the time.
If you got a kick out of the things Ethan Hawke had to say about making art, then don't miss the TED talk he gave last year: Give yourself permission to be creative. (Also check out Permission and practice in the archive, where I write a bit more about this TED talk and other artists' thoughts on practicing your art.)
The world might not be rooting for you, but I am, and you can root for yourself, too. In fact, rooting for yourself is essential.
Happy October to you all!
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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