The Book That Gave Me the Courage to Start My Substack

A Personal Reflection on Art & Fear + A Selection of Inspiring Quotes | dad's bookshelf no. 01

Learning is the natural reward of meetings with remarkable ideas, and remarkable people.

— David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

I. Discovering Art & Fear: A Reader’s Origin Story

I’m finally turning in my homework assignment: it’s about 15 years late.

I started reading Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking for a creative writing class during the fall semester of 2008. I was a lost, wayward, first-generation college student who had already accumulated 5 W’s, 2 F’s, and 1 C during my first academic year at my local community college. Amidst all the failing, however, I had managed to get an A in freshman composition. So, in a desperate attempt to confirm I was actually good at something, I thought I’d try my hand at writing stories.

It turned out to be the only creative writing class I ever took, and it’s also the only English class I ever received a B in. (Historically speaking, I either get F’s or W’s in my classes or all A’s—no middle ground, only extremes, my life encapsulated in GPA.)

After receiving my homework assignment to read Art & Fear over the weekend, I made it through the introduction before closing the book and putting it away. I wouldn’t seriously open it again until November of 2023.

My lack of interest had nothing to do with the quality of the book itself. I just wasn’t a good student in those days. Whenever I came home from my cashiering job at the grocery store, all I wanted to do was relax, have a Coke or maybe an IPA, and sedate myself with video games—not contemplate “the perils (and rewards) of artmaking.” The desire to make art was within me but not yet activated, curious but not serious.

Sometimes, though, you make a connection with a book you haven’t read, some intuited sense that it holds a lesson for you, but one you’re not quite ready for yet; it’s not the right time to receive its gift.

What often feels like procrastination can actually be patiently waiting for the right time to encounter a book when your heart and mind are most open, and when the book’s words will most comfort and soothe you. I like to believe that books wait and find you when you most need them, the wisdom of voices present and past circulating through the ether until they find the receptive heart in need of their restorative powers. Rather than coming to you during a time of abundance or indifference, they come to you during a time of scarcity or crisis.

Art and Fear is one of those books for me: a thin paperback with a glossy cover that catches all my fingerprints, an old companion with yellowing pages who has faithfully accompanied me from one apartment to another over the last 15 years and from the coast of California to the cornfields of the Midwest, waiting patiently on bookshelves and in cardboard boxes, listening and biding its time.

II. Living with Fear but No Art

Within the last year or so, I’ve found myself trying to resolve what’s suddenly become an unbearable tension in my life; namely, writing and consuming great writing have been at the center of my professional life for over a decade, yet I’ve written nothing for myself. The writing I’ve done over this period has always been safe and tethered to some academic or professional goal: writing that undergraduate essay on Hamlet, finishing my dissertation (which I hated), polishing a teaching statement, crafting persuasive cover letters, and all the rest of it. And while all of this is a privilege—one I’m grateful for, believe me—and a joy, it remains the fulfillment of a professional dream. There remains one nagging problem: what about my writing? Heck, am I even a writer? Those who can, do, and those who can’t . . .

Anything I have scribbled in the intervals between periods of laziness and productive stretches of getting my life together has stayed hidden on my computer behind nondescript file names like “Essay 1” and buried in a labyrinth of misdirecting folders, each with self-deprecating titles like “Junk Drawer” or “Random Shit.” No one, and I mean no one, has seen my writing.¹ I’ve made sure of that.

I wish I could offer you a less cliched reason why I’ve avoided writing publicly for so long, but the answer is I simply haven’t been able to muster the courage to be vulnerable, to put myself out there, and expose my writing to the inevitable criticisms that come with sharing one’s opinions—and heart—with the internet.

Secretly, in the back of my mind, I’ve always clung to the fantasy I could be a published writer beloved by a public audience—you know, if I really tried and all that. But what if reality punctures that illusion? If I do try really hard, and it turns out I’m average? No one reads or cares about my work because it’s forgettable? It’s confirmed I can’t write anything beyond academic genres? What then?

In these anxious moments, it’s clear to me how much of my identity and self-worth are tied to the idea of being a writer, which is somewhat odd, considering how neglectful I’ve been of actually writing, but it also makes perfect sense: It was learning to see myself as a capable writer that motivated me to go from academic failure to getting a Ph.D. and eventually being hired to help run one of the largest university writing centers in the country. To risk the integrity of this writing identity I had spent so long building in the face of relentless imposter syndrome by exposing it to the caprice of public opinion seemed foolish or perhaps even reckless. Protecting my identity as a “good” writer has always taken precedence over the risk of creating art.

That is until I stumbled across this little thing called Substack in the fall of 2023 and saw within it my best opportunity to resolve the tension that had been weighing on me. I found myself overwhelmed by the persistence of an undeniable feeling: I want to be a writer—and not just one at work; I want to make things and give them as gifts, offerings of friendship and connection.

But, faced with the prospect of writing publicly—e.g., starting dad trying—I caught myself thinking maybe, just maybe, it’s better to continue holding on tightly to that fantasy, the one where I’m always successful, rather trying to make it a reality and ending up revealing I was never capable of being a writer to begin with. In other words, I want to start a Substack, but I’m scared; I want to make art but I’m afraid.

Suddenly, this tiny book that had spent the better part of a decade slumbering on my shelf began to stir. I needed its guidance, and so, finally, in November of 2023, I opened Art & Fear and began reading.

It is a moment whose animating spirit is best captured by American sculptor Stephen De Staebler in one of the book’s many inspiring epigraphs:

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.”

Or, as Bayles and Orland themselves later observe:

The depth of your need to make things establishes the level of risk in not making them.

Indeed. So here we are, you and me.

III. 15 of My Favorite Quotes

Bayles and Orland tackle three basic questions in Art & Fear:

What I hope to leave you with is a sampling of treasures I pulled from Art & Fear in the form of the authors’ answers to these questions. Choosing which quotes to include in this post was a difficult task. After all, I made 156 annotations on my Kindle edition. To help solve this dilemma, I’ve opted to include those that I feel best demonstrate the impressive range of concerns Bayles and Orland cover in their small but timeless book. The goal is to let the quotes (or, in some cases, more properly described as excerpts) speak for themselves.

I hope these quotes give you some of the value they gave me and, if they resonate, you’ll consider picking this book up and spending a weekend with it—assuming it’s time for you two to talk.

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On Artistic Risk:

After all, wanting to be understood is a basic need—an affirmation of the humanity you share with everyone around you. The risk is fearsome: in making your real work you hand the audience the power to deny the understanding you seek; you hand them the power to say, “you’re not like us; you’re weird; you’re crazy.”

But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you’re not up to the task—that you can’t do it, or can’t do it well, or can’t do it again; or that you’re not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his / her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all—and for those who do, trouble isn’t long in coming.

Simply put, making art is chancy — it doesn’t mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.

You have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot — and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

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On Process, “Failure,” and Mistakes:

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.

The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.

Such imperfections (or mistakes, if you’re feeling particularly depressed about them today) are your guides — valuable, reliable, objective, non-judgmental guides — to matters you need to reconsider or develop further. It is precisely this interaction between the ideal and the real that locks your art into the real world, and gives meaning to both.

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On Defining Fear:

Fears about artmaking fall into two families: fears about yourself, and fears about your reception by others . . . In a general way, fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work.

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On Talent, Jealousy, and Voice:

But the important point here is not that you have — or don’t have — what other artists have, but rather that it doesn’t matter. Whatever they have is something needed to do their work — it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it. Their magic is theirs. You don’t lack it. You don’t need it. It has nothing to do with you. Period.

Artistically and otherwise, the world we come into has already been observed and defined by others — thoroughly, redundantly, comprehensively, and usually quite appropriately. The human race has spent several millennia developing a huge and robust set of observations about the world, in forms as varied as language, art and religion. Those observations in turn have withstood many — enormously many — tests. We stand heir to an unstatably large set of meanings . . . And so you make your place in the world by making part of it — by contributing some new part to the set. And surely one of the more astonishing rewards of artmaking comes when people make time to visit the world you have created. Some, indeed, may even purchase a piece of your world to carry back and adopt as their own. Each new piece of your art enlarges our reality. The world is not yet done.

To make art is to sing with the human voice. To do this you must first learn that the only voice you need is the voice you already have. Art work is ordinary work, but it takes courage to embrace that work, and wisdom to mediate the interplay of art & fear. Sometimes to see your work’s rightful place you have to walk to the edge of the precipice and search the deep chasms. You have to see that the universe is not formless and dark throughout, but awaits simply the revealing light of your own mind. Your art does not arrive miraculously from the darkness, but is made uneventfully in the light.

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On Approval and Criticism:

The lesson here is simply that courting approval, even that of peers, puts a dangerous amount of power in the hands of the audience. Worse yet, the audience is seldom in a position to grant (or withhold) approval on the one issue that really counts—namely, whether or not you’re making progress in your work. They’re in a good position to comment on how they’re moved (or challenged or entertained) by the finished product, but have little knowledge or interest in your process. Audience comes later. The only pure communication is between you and your work.

When sense of self depends so directly upon the ranking bestowed by the outside world, motivation to produce work that brings high ratings is extreme. In not knowing how to tell yourself that your work is OK, you may be driven to the top of the heap in trying to get the rest of the world to tell you.

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On Artmaking

Between the initial idea and the finished piece lies a gulf we can see across, but never fully chart. The truly special moments in artmaking lie in those moments when concept is converted to reality — those moments when the gulf is being crossed. Precise descriptions fail, but it connects to that wonderful condition in which the work seems to make itself and the artist serves only as guide or mediator, allowing all things to be possible.

The need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are custodian of issues larger than self.

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Bonus Quotes That Describe My Feelings about Substack:

The urge to compete provides a source of raw energy, and for that purpose alone it can be exceptionally useful. In a healthy artistic environment, that energy is directed inward to fulfill one’s own potential. In a healthy artistic environment, artists are not in competition with each another.

What we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage-by-association. Depth of contact grows as fears are shared — and thereby disarmed — and this comes from embracing art as process, and artists as kindred spirits.

Artists come together in the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice their art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

IV. Postscript: 50 Pounds of Pots

I’d be remiss to end this post without acknowledging one of the most famous stories from the book. I’d wager you’ve heard it somewhere (I, for one, have heard it on several podcasts). It goes like this:

The ceramics teacher divides the class into two groups. The folks on the left side of the room would be graded on quantity while the folks on the right would be graded on quality. To grade the quantity group, he’d use a bathroom scale; students that produced fifty pounds of pots would receive an “A.” The folks on the right side would be graded by their ability to produce one perfect pot. As you might expect, the quantity group ends up producing the best work while the quality group is frozen by perfectionism and overcomplicating what a “perfect” pot is.

In many ways, this story captures the ethos of Art & Fear: just keep making art, just keep piling up those pots; to focus on perfectionism instead of process—to be frozen by fear of evaluation (is it an “A”?!) —undermines your work and robs the art of its joy.

Here is to making a shitload of pots.

1. The one exception to this is my wife, Leah. She reads everything and is always the person I most want to impress or make laugh. She is, in other words, what Stephen King refers to as the Ideal Reader: “Call that one person you write for Ideal Reader. He or she is going to be in your writing room all the time: in the flesh once you open the door and let the world back in to shine on the bubble of your dream, in spirit during the sometimes troubling and often exhilarating days of the first draft, when the door is closed. And you know what? You’ll find yourself bending the story even before Ideal Reader glimpses so much as the first sentence. I.R. will help you get outside yourself a little, to actually read your work in progress as an audience would while you’re still working.”