My first piece of advice regarding creative careers is not to start a creative career.
I cannot promise you success, but I can promise you coffee.
If you’re reading this, then I’m going to guess that you’re a creative person. In fact, I’ll make three bets.
I bet you feel like you’re positively bursting with ideas, and you can’t wait to start sharing them.
I’ll also hazard that you have some technical skills—whether it’s writing, painting, drawing, building, coding, game mastering, or something else, and that whatever that thing is, you can’t help doing it. Do you doodle compulsively? Constantly rehearse stories in your head? Are you always planning an ambitious craft project or business venture?
Third, I bet you dream of spending more of your time practicing your art and even making a living doing it.
I feel all those things too. So, I want to share everything I’ve learned trying to live those dreams. I hope that this information will help you expand your creative life. Along the way, you might even discover a creative carer.
But that’s not where it starts.
Should you even listen to me?
First, should you even listen to me? Maybe not. That first thing? The one where you’re bursting with ideas? I’m like that too. Every single f*g day I’ve got new ideas. And some of them are pretty good.
That second one? I’ve made some pretty cool stuff. I wrote a little game called How to Host a Dungeon. I printed up 100 copies and carried them to Gen Con in 2006 and it has been a small, but steady seller ever since. And I also made this weird little map that was very successful on Kickstarter.
The third one? Well, I certainly don’t make a living making art or games. My day job includes quite a lot of writing, and I’m pretty happy about that. I have a moderately successful Patreon where a dedicated group of folks have supported my work for years. Most of the time I can work a sub 40-hour work week and spend some of the rest of the time doing my art. But a living? Not even close.
Still, I’m a dreamer, and I’m *seriously* dedicated to making the dream real.
So, if you think a person like that might have some advice to give, read on.
Don’t start a creative career
My first piece of advice is to not start a creative career. Don’t found a creative business. Don’t try to land a job in the game industry.
Not that starting a career or a business is the path of failure. Plenty of folks have gone there and done big things. But that’s not the path I’m going to recommend.
The assumption I started with is that you’re a creative person with creative desires. Like me! Nothing about that primes you for success in the worlds of career and business.
Business is full of, well, business people. Business people are good at doing business stuff, and that includes beating out competitors, optimizing production, paying a little, taking a lot, and generally stealing someone else’s lunch. There are some really great business people out there and, if you run into one, work with them like crazy. But do not set out with the goal of starting a business… unless starting a business is what you’re passionate about. But if that’s your passion, this article isn’t aimed at you.
Making money is its own skill, science, and craft—a different one than yours. When you start a business, you’re leaning into your money-making skill, not your creative skill.
This includes starting up your new business selling through Etsy, Shopify, or whatever marketplace is big today. I’m not saying you wont’do that. I’m just not suggesting it as a starting place. Starting a shop isn’t the first, second, or 50th step to a creative life. Starting an online shop when you’re not ready for it is a great way to give some online service providers a bit of money and waste a huge amount of your time doing not-creative stuff.
Likewise, careers.
Careers are a thing created by business people to get workers to settle with a bunch of unpleasant rules in return for safety, stability, a living and, maybe someday, a bit of comfortable wealth. All those things are great, and careers aren’t bad things after all (I’ve got one of my own). But if you start with a creative passion and a career, one of them’s going to end up disappointed. In the end, careers are about safety for you and control for someone else, and neither one is going to help you on your creative path.
The weird thing is, you might end up with a business or a career or both.
That’s the strange thing about a creative life. It’s full of surprises—business and career included. But those aren’t what you’re in it for. You’re in it for the best surprise of all—making something amazing and having it rewarded.
So, what then?
If you've read this far and you're still with me, then what I advise is to work on your creative life and make a creative career that fits within that life. If sound interesting, then here's where you start: what’s the thing that you could do, over and over again, on and on, and never ever get bored of it and still want to do more? That’s where you start.
For me, that thing was drawing dungeon maps. I liked it so much, that I made a game about it, and that game started me on my creative path.
How to Host a Dungeon, the game that started it all for me.
Here’s an important rule. That thing you’re called to do needs to be something that involves craft. It’s got to be something like making, writing, inventing, painting, or designing. If it’s putting together things in new and surprising ways, that’s great too. If your passion is just dreaming up ideas, investing, or being in charge of a grand enterprise, you’ll do better somewhere else.
Once you’ve got that one thing, the rest is a practical exercise. Yes, there will be ups and downs, successes and crushing defeats, but you can get there. You might get pretty hungry, and you might labor in obscurity. But then again, you might just have some really great successes, and even put some food on your table in the meantime.
What’s next?
Figuring out the puzzle of the creative life is a passion of mine. So, I’m going to keep writing on this subject. Your homework is to think about that one creative thing you love to do. Lean into it. Find a way to make it a part of your life daily. In a future article I’ll talk a bit about expectations and the goal of making your craft pay you something.