A Career in the Arts Isn't a Normal Job. It's More Like Being a Professional Athlete.
The hard is what makes it great.
When I was a teenager, I was a competitive swimmer, and I was quite good — the best on my high school team.
Impressed by my ability, my high school coach sometimes invited me to swim with another team he coached, Tacoma Swim Club, which at the time was probably the best pre-college team in the United States. The families of would-be Olympic hopefuls would move to my hometown just to be able to swim for this team and its more famous main coach, Dick Hannula.
Which meant that when I was sixteen years old, I spent a lot of time around some really serious young swimmers. Some would go on to qualify for the Olympic team and a few even won medals.
I held my own with these swimmers, at least in workouts, but I never seriously considered getting on the Olympic track myself, for a lot of different reasons. For one thing, I wasn’t that good. Plus, I was already in my mid-teens, which was regarded as too late to begin a serious swimming career.
But more than anything, I didn’t like the way these kids lived. They were in the pool six to eight hours a day, six days a week — on top of going to high school!
More than one of these kids told me outright: “Yeah, I’m basically giving up my childhood for a shot at serious competitive swimming.”
I loved swimming, but in the end, it wasn’t anything more than fun for me.
It’s ironic that I turned up my nose at that high level of competition, because I grew up and chose a profession that’s at least as intense.
I embarked on a career in the arts.
The longer I do it, the more I see how a career as a writer is eerily similar to training for an Olympic or professional sport.
It requires an extremely high level of both skill and discipline, especially if you want an ongoing career.
And just as with professional sports, the vast majority of people who attempt a career in the arts will fail — either that or they’ll make the choice that I made with swimming back in high school and decide it simply isn’t worth the effort.
Because it is a lot of effort.
A career in sports is harder on the body, but a career in the arts might be tougher on the soul. After all, in sports, at least you know where you stand compared to the other athletes — sometimes with an exact ranking, as in professional tennis, or with a time down to the hundredth of a second, as in competitive swimming.
It’s completely different in the arts. William Goldman, the screenwriter of All the President’s Men and The Princess Bride, once famously said about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”
Art is notoriously subjective. Every year when the Oscar nominations are announced, there is always immediately a huge debate about what’s deserving — and what’s an overrated piece of crap.
And these are the Oscars, supposedly the very best that Hollywood has to offer for the previous year.
Meanwhile, whatever people say about Serena Williams, no one ever says, “Eh, I don’t think she’s a very good tennis player.”
I’m trying to think of a career other than the arts where you can be on the verge of a huge, life-changing success and not even know it. Even worse, you can think you are on the verge, but in reality, you’re not even close.
In the arts, especially as a writer, I think it’s much easier to delude yourself.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about how maddening a career in the arts can be (and I’m sure it won’t be the last).
But the point of this particular piece is to say that a lot of this struggle is important. It’s how you improve — how you learn to write at a professional level.
It’s a feature of the system, not a bug.
And yet, in every writing medium these days, I find myself surrounded by would-be writers complaining about how massively unfair the system is.
In New York publishing, it’s impossible to get an agent unless you’re already published.
In Hollywood, it’s impossible to get anyone to read your script unless you’re already produced.
On Substack — where I have a successful newsletter about my travels — it’s impossible to get any attention unless you’re already famous.
Which, on one hand, I get. Recent technologies and changes in the marketplace really have seriously disrupted New York publishing and Hollywood movie-making.
(That said, I still think there are massive opportunities in new media.)
But on the other hand, I remember the classic 1992 sports movie, A League of Their Own, where Tom Hanks says, “There’s no crying in baseball!”
Sometimes I think there should be less crying in the arts too, at least in public. (It’s always okay to cry to close friends.)
Most of the rejection people complain about is also unavoidable. How would it work if everyone who wrote a novel landed a publishing deal? If everyone who wrote a screenplay saw it produced?
For one thing, who would read all these novels and watch all these movies?
But even apart from that, isn’t that like an Olympics where everyone wins a gold medal? If that happened, would a gold medal mean anything?
Whoever wins a sports competition is considered “the best.” Things are murkier in the arts where “the best” isn’t always as clear-cut.
But success is still success.
Later in A League of Their Own, Tom Hanks tells Geena Davis about the sport of baseball: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great."
It’s exactly the same in the arts. A successful career is really, really hard.
And that’s exactly what makes it great.
Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.
Agree! A lot of what makes it feel unfair is that the rewards don't directly match the effort put in. One can spend hundreds of hours on a project that earns nothing. Money and art have always been strange bedfellows!
Brent! So much this. As someone who came up in the worlds of science and industry, I find this constant lamenting about the "unfairness" of the "system" exhausting. Traditional Publishing and Hollywood are businesses -- dysfunctional ones, sure -- but businesses nonetheless, which are built around competition. In any competition, few win, and many, many, many more lose.
When I wrote my first novel I failed miserably. Then, I improved, stayed the course, and "won" on my second attempt. And now I'm starting all over again from scratch. That's the nature of the game.
I realize listening to me talk for 80 minutes is a monster ask, but I think you might enjoy a recent podcast discussion I had with a fellow writer: https://stockfiction.substack.com/p/talk-fiction-e4
Anyway, thanks again for writing this kickass piece. It's just what everyone needs to hear.