The Audience Comes Last

The tension I feel

I’m reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act right now, which is a great book on creativity if you can spit out the weird spirituality elements.¹ And I’ve been weighing a couple of quotes from it side-by-side. Rubin writes:

“In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last.”

And

“One of the greatest rewards of making art is our ability to share it. Even if there is no audience to receive it, we build the muscle of making something and putting it out into the world. Finishing our work is a good habit to develop. It boosts confidence. Despite our insecurities, the more times we can bring ourselves to release our work, the less weight insecurity has.”

I feel both of these things right now.

I want to write like nobody’s watching for whoever wants to watch, I guess is the best way to put it.

I need to be simultaneously content writing words no one may ever read and have the courage to share writing that may be uncomfortable to share.

I haven’t finished Rubin’s book yet, but what I’ve appreciated most about it so far is how it has reminded me that the creative act shouldn’t be audience-first in its orientation. If we want to do something artful, we can’t be consumed by the practical. We need to be more driven by what inspires us and less driven by what we think people want.

Pragmatic writing is safe, at least for me. Breaking down research about social media and applying it to our faith is so much more comfortable than writing something like this, sharing something about my personal life, or attempting a bit of creative writing.

With sharing more artful writing (opposed to pragmatic writing) comes feelings of vulnerability and insecurity, and that’s what Rubin addresses in the second quote I shared above.

I was listening to Rubin be interviewed on a podcast recently and he said as a piece of advice for people who are feeling a creative “block” of any kind, “Everything I create is a diary entry.”

And that’s very much what I’m letting myself feel with regard to this newsletter and, frankly, anything else I work to create in the near future. The more my work feels like diary entries that are made available for public consumption and less like products for a waiting audience, the more freedom there is to create and enjoy the creative process.

As I sort of shared in my piece relaunching this newsletter—I’m trying to be better at being a bit less audience-driven, a bit less pragmatic, and a bit more artful and vulnerable here. And while I could contain all of that creative vulnerability to a private folder on my computer, I want to share it with anywhere from two to two-thousand people not because I long for the attention, but because I need to break through my own insecurity.

Creative insecurity is rough. Maybe you feel it? I do. But building the muscle, as Rubin says, of creating something and putting it out into the world is a worthy pursuit regardless of reception or usefulness.

1. But honestly, even some of these can be helpful if you baptize them a bit and look at them through a Christian lens.