The Fallacy of the Starving Artist

Artists are poor—that’s just the way things are. Our job doesn’t give us health benefits, insurance, retirement. And there is a kind of nobility in this holy poverty—it gives us something to write about at least. We all know that making art requires suffering. Look at Henry Miller, Hemingway. Besides, rich people are assholes.

These are the things I’ve been telling myself for years, beliefs about money that have kept me where I am: poor and self-righteous.

I’ve known that something was amiss with my relationship with money for several years. I’ve seen how these beliefs, my own self-imposed and fiercely sustained glass ceiling, have ultimately limited my own financial success as an artist. I just didn’t know how far the rabbit hole went.

A few months ago I took a class called “Financial Literacy,” which was not a class that taught you how to make investments or balance your budget but a class that examined your relationship with money. And I proudly recited my known negative beliefs, feeling like I was ahead of the game in my self-disclosure.

But once I cleared away those obvious weeds I realized that there were more insidious ones waiting still to be exhumed. They sounded something like this: "Well, it’s not like I’m going to write a bestseller. Have you seen the fluff that gets on the bestseller's lists these days? I would have more financial success as a writer if I wrote cookbooks or “how to change your oil” manuals. No, I write literary fiction, and because I won’t stoop and write mass-market garbage, I will just have to accept smaller circulations with more refined readers. In other words, I’ll work till I die and I’ll never have a lot of money, but I’ll be a 'real' artist."

A few choice words come to mind, of course, like: what a load of pretentious crap.

I’ve been telling myself this, perhaps, because I was afraid to dream bigger dreams. I’ve told myself that it’s unrealistic. Funny thing is, I’ve started to sound strangely like a grown up. A grown up with self-imposed limitations. A grown up who has given up dreaming.

A character in my book, American Gypsy, says the following: “You know, I think it’s something about growing older,” Howie finally says. “We stop dreaming. When we’re in our 20’s we’re full of ideas, we’re going to change the world, we’re going to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the Mothership is going to descend and tell us the secrets of the universe. When you’re 20 you’re resilient—if one dream dies you replace it with another and just keep going. Somehow, as we get older, we don’t seem to replace them. We just keep holding on to the same old tired dream even though it doesn’t work anymore, we just keep trying to make it fit. I guess this is what happened to our parents. Remember my dad always saying “Oh, I did that in the 60’s?” What the fuck happened to all of them? Well, now that I’m older I get it. They hit one disappointment too many, and a little spark of hope died. And then another, and another…”

I see the connection with my own life. By embracing the fallacy of the starving artist I was not making a childhood dream come true, I was actually limiting my own potential as a writer. I was telling myself, just as thousands of parents tell their children every day, “It’s okay to be an artist, but just don’t think that you’re going to make any money doing it.” I justified my choices by saying I didn’t need money, that I was happy being a starving artist. But there is a difference between living simply and panicking every time you have to pay the rent. Henry Miller starving in the streets of Paris sounds so romantic, now. In truth, starving is starving, and it’s nothing to aspire to.

I am a hard-working, talented writer. Not worrying about money will not make me less of an artist—on the contrary. I can be an artist and have enough.

As a young dreamer I always knew that I would have enough, even abundance. Now, a more practical adult with children, I am consumed with what I don’t have, what is not possible. What if, just for a moment, I again opened the possibilities for my future? What if I made the fallacy of the starving artist what it really is—a fallacy?

I know wishing for any kind of success alone will not make it happen. Success takes hard work and lots and lots and lots of cups of coffee. But how can I possibly achieve a success that I don’t even believe possible? How can we achieve what we cannot dream?

The first step in dismantling the starving artist fallacy is to dismiss the brainwashing. Artists can be prosperous. They can have health insurance. They can retire. The bestseller’s lists still beckon.

We can still be whatever we want to be, as long as we have the courage to believe our own hearts.