There was once a surgeon that I was friends with, who wasn’t able to save one of his patients. When he told me about it, I advised him to look for a new career because it clearly wasn’t working out for him.
There was once a teacher that I knew who had never taught anyone before but had trained for the last few years and was hopeful about becoming a teacher. I decided to ask her if she had a plan B because how did she know for sure that it was going to work out?
There was once a plumber that I knew who couldn’t find the source of a problem at a customer’s house, so I told him that he might as well retrain as something else because if it hasn’t worked for him now then it’s not going to work out from here on in.
There was once a doctor I knew and I was so excited about her being a doctor that I wanted to know ALLLLL the famous people that had been her patients and whether there were any surgeries that I would have seen her in or heard about.
Ludicrous right?
Laughable even?
Why would I say such a thing to people who have clearly worked hard and spent endless amounts of time crafting out meaningful careers, I hear you say?!
All of those things above, didn’t happen. I never said anything like that to any of my friends in those professions. But let me “flip reverse it” a little bit and give you a different perspective.
When I was at school about to leave and go to college, I was told that a creative career was too risky and far too much of a pipedream to be realistic. A teacher at school tried to persuade me to stay on at sixth form and do my A-Levels because that would be a much more sensible thing to do. It would apparently give me a level of protection and futureproof a career.
When I got my first of many rejections for industry jobs ( rejection is a part of the business), I was advised by well meaning friends that I should probably look into a new career because this clearly wasn’t going anywhere.
When I went freelance and was chatting to a friend as I was coming to the end of a production without the next thing lined up, I was asked if I had a plan B because how did I know for sure that this was going to work out.
When I got an inhouse job at a production company and I was earning a steady salary, no one questioned my choices because they had a way of measuring “success”.
When I started writing films again a few years ago, during the Pandemic and after I had lost all of my work, well meaning friends sent me job ads for other industries and tried to persuade me to retrain as something else! This was at the same time as ya man Rishi Sunak launched a thoughtless advertising campaign to get people to move from the arts and retrain in tech.
When I meet new people and they ask what I do and I tell them that I work in film and TV, one of the first questions that I get asked is whether I’ve worked with anyone famous or whether I have worked on anything that they would know, as if that’s the measurement for whether something has value or not.
Can we please stop saying these things to people who have a creative industry related job?!
These things wouldn’t get said to a teacher or a doctor or a plumber or a surgeon or a multitude of other jobs but we find it completely acceptable to do so to the likes of writers, actors and filmmakers etc.
I’ve been asked a few times, what success looks like for me and I think people get disappointed by the answer. I’ve stopped being able to answer this question in a whimsical way because it’s started to get on my nerves when people ask me this and expect me to say things like: “millions of followers, an Oscar, being famous etc etc”. Success for me looks like completing the thing! When I’m writing a script, success for me is getting that first draft fully written - it takes A LONG TIME to get the first draft of a script written and a lot of people never get there. This year I hadn’t finished one script (until this month!!!!), does that mean that I should just pack it all in? Absolutely not! Because success this year has not looked like getting a finished script written, it’s looked like falling back in love with film again after a year of my life looking completely uprooted and put back down topsy turvy.
My point is, a creative career requires a consistent collection of blood, sweat and tears. It requires you to truly love your craft, to truly give everything you have to it. It’s painful at best and is filled with nights of self imposed doubt, insomnia and writer's block like you would not believe. When I say that it’s not as glamorous as you think it is, I mean it.
Why do I keep doing it? Because I love it and I care about this industry more than I care about a lot of things, if truth be told. It’s not a side hustle, it’s work and people work hard to bring projects to life and it can take years!
We are our own worst critics and the best thing that we could require from our well meaning friends is as much of the same support that is given to people with conventional jobs or for all of those blockbuster productions that you’re fed on streaming platforms. My job history might not make sense to you and might look like I’m jumping from thing to thing to thing but that is the life of most freelancers I know in this industry and therefore should not be judged in the same way as someone who is not self employed. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t always want to talk about work, sometimes talking about anything other than our work lives is actually very welcome.
Why have I chosen to post this?
I’m fed up with the rhetoric that the work I do is a pet project and comes secondary to my part time work and when I talk to other creative pals about it, it seems to be a blanket problem that most of us experience on a regular basis. So perhaps next time you’re judging someone on their visible successes, you might want to think about all of the unseen things of this industry and that includes the unseen things behind the scenes of many of the film and TV shows that you love that would have taken years to develop, produce and distribute and that you’ve devoured in the space of a day.
Perhaps this visual representation will help somewhat to sum up what it is that I’m talking about.
The arts are always one of the first things to go from people’s budgets when they’re looking to cut back. It’s always the first thing to be cut when the government needs to save money. It’s the first thing to be cut when the education system decides that they need to add more emphasis to Maths to compete with other countries. It’s something that we take for granted but we need now more than ever.
Protect your creative pals and their visions for the stories that they want to put out into the world. We are fickle human beings who have already done much of the doubting that you throw our way in the name of being a caring friend. So just get with our delusions earlier than when we pick up an award for the fruits of our labours.
We need it now, not then.
🫶🏻
Extremely insightful and helpful.
Thanks for sharing Nessa! You really ARE amazing!