How to be successful: Dream, create & make money in the arts 1

Being a Successful Creative – The Business of Creativity  – Post One

I have decided it is time for me to commit to writing a series of daily blogs for you on how to dream up, build, market and sell a creative event, gig, festival, book launch, cabaret night, exhibition of rude plastic cupcakes or whatever creatively inspires you. It is time to create and put on that play about your family, a series of drawings about hedgehogs, the album you have talked about making or the short film you always wanted to write and make.  It is time for me to write you a daily action plan  to inspire you to dream and make some money at your art form.

It is very easy to either wait on someone else’s permission to create, or only produce when you have a deadline based on a commission or being cast in a role.

However the road to long term mental and emotional health as a creative is, I believe, to be in control of your output and career, not waiting on others or even others’ opinions. If a shark doesn’t swim she dies, and so do us creatives; if we don’t practise, sing, paint, write, film, dream and do, then we get depressed, angry, eat, have ridiculous high drama relationships or use other addictions to feed the feeling of emptiness. I truly believe that if we have this need within us, this dream to create then it is because we were born to do so, it is our very soul demanding for our voices to sing and express our world perception in the artistic way that is right for us.
I am convinced that we are never given the gifts, the dreams and the ideas without also being gifted with the talent, the drive and ability to actually deliver. It is our own negativity and others that gets in the  way of fulfilling our life’s purpose.

So I am taking up the baton, not the bottle, for us all.

I have put on hundreds, if not thousands of events, shows, launches, either for myself, a company or others. From festivals to a Blonde Exhibition of photographs, to London gigs to tour managing a dance act in Europe (the less said about that the better ;-). I once had a would be singer/producer  in the pub nearly in tears begging me to tell him how: it was all rather dramatic and let’s face it, this is not a one night stand, more like a long dirty affair with Easy Jet flights involved at the very least.

Steven Pressman did a fantastic blog post entitled ‘Put your ass where your heart wants to be’  that finally pushed me over the edge on this series.

So I am writing this for you, lets get our dream head on.. and then lets make our art a reality.

WARNING HIGH VOLTAGE: This is my way of doing it, I am far from perfect, had probably twice as many bad reviews as good, but I have always sold out at least a few shows every run but if you follow this you will create, market and release to the world your creativity.

You can always take this process at a quarter of the pace  and learn from my many many lessons of failure and success, bruised knees (when a stool collapsed as I was lying across it singing Making Whoopee at Edinburgh) and reviewer watching as I accidentally insulted an entire nation – who knew Canada was so PC….

To Do Now:
Turn off your computer or iPhone and start dreaming about what you would like to make, create, dream up if you were given permission and freedom to do so. Go for a walk without your phone and just let your spirit start to wonder what it could do given half a chance.

I will be back tomorrow and then we will move this forward.

Credit -The cartoon image is from the flyer for ‘Heart of Time”, a play written by Amy Bird that I did recently.