Degrees of separation

between creative people and their audiences

Writing is a very strange pastime when you stop to think about it.

You shut yourself away from the world and try to create your own version of it, or an alternative to it, or draw conclusions about it. You experience, filter and interpret. And what you create are castles in the air, your own realms. And then you expect other people to visit your castle and share your vision. But until you present this vision to the world you can have little or no idea about whether it will resonate.

As an online author, you really only see the reactions of other people if they are engaged enough to leave a response. Views and reads on Medium show your possible reach, and hearts give you some indication of the response you have evoked. But it is the comments that give you more of an understanding about exactly what touched people, if anything.

Writing on an online platform provides you with this valuable opportunity to gauge immediate reaction. Writing physical books leaves the author a step further removed; in the past, unless your readers decided to contact you, the only method you had of gauging response was via reviews and sales. And poor sales didn’t necessarily mean that your creation was not good — your work may just have been poorly marketed and may have gone unnoticed. In the age of the internet, we now have author pages where readers can leave comments, and we also have Twitter. I follow many authors on Twitter and I can see that it’s a way of engaging, making a connection, and both giving and gaining feedback.

This made me think about how creatives and artists in other media get feedback.

Some time ago I was talking to a good friend of mine who is an artist and I said that I envied the immediacy of her medium of creativity. To clarify, I meant that a person can walk in front of a painting, in a gallery or a shop, and take in the whole of the painting at once. You can look at a painting for just a minute or two and have a visceral reaction to it. The more you study some paintings, of course, the more you draw from them; you will see details that you hadn’t noticed at first, or start to appreciate symbolism and references the artist may have chosen to use. But the fact remains that an onlooker can get an immediate impression in just a few moments.

I contrasted this to the delayed reaction and longer time span needed for a reader to read a novel. This form of creative work cannot be appreciated instantly, although people may decide whether to buy a book on the strength of its cover, or blurb, or opening lines. But it is a fact that they cannot take in the piece as a whole in an immediate way. Reading a novel is a longer process than looking at a painting and, arguably, requires more effort on the part of the ‘receiver’ of the creation.

My friend found that interesting because, as an artist, she feels that her work is already removed from her audience. She had talked, similarly, to someone close to her about envying the immediacy of their creativity; that person is a musician. He can sit and play in front of an audience and get an immediate reaction. While this could be very daunting, it also gives you the opportunity to feed on the enthusiasm of your audience, because the music you create, or rather the process of presenting it, is ongoing, in a way that a painting or a piece of writing are not. They are already finished when you present them to other people.

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning the popularity of such shows as Sky Arts Landscape Painter of the Year, or the BBC’s Great Pottery Throw Down. I’m by no means alone in finding these shows fascinating, mainly because they allow one to watch an artist at work, and to see a painting or a ceramic piece actually being imagined and created over the course of a few hours. Listening to the artists’ comments on their vision for a piece and being able to witness how the creative process develops make for addictive viewing. Somehow I can’t imagine that watching a writer sit at a desk and type would have the same fascination, because the art being produced is not visual, and it’s not immediate in a physical sense.

On consideration, the immediacy of response that applies to live musicians is lost to artists going into a recording studio to record a track for release. But while the latter may be dependent on sales or streaming figures to gauge the success or reception of a piece, they also have the opportunity afterwards to tour and play to a live audience, and again be physically in the midst of people’s response to their work.

This has a parallel to actors working in theatre or on film. Actors on a theatre stage have an audience which responds immediately, while actors in a film are reliant on reviews and box office sales to gauge response. Performance poets have this physical audience too, and performance poetry demands a whole different set of skills and character strengths, additional to those needed by traditional, written poets.

I recently read an excellent book The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, the famous choreographer. I highly recommend it as a guide and memoir to developing a creative way of life, whatever discipline you work in. Her form of creativity has yet another dimension because it relies on other people — her dancers — to present her vision successfully to an audience; it has to be filtered through this other layer. And while Tharp can see the effect of the dance she created, on both her dancers and on the audience, she is reliant on watching someone else perform her art. Composers and conductors of music are in a similar position — dependent on others to interpret and execute for them.

I wonder how much choice we have about which form of creativity we adopt. Do we choose it, or does it choose us? I assume we are drawn to a particular form of creativity because of an ability within us, whether this is innate or the result of teaching and nurture.

I haven’t picked up a paintbrush to create a painting since I was at school, having found then that I had no particular skill at it. But painting and drawing are forms of expression that I wish I were good at, and they are things that perhaps I will try again in the future. However, I know beyond shadow of a doubt that I will never walk onto a stage and act — the idea fills me with horror! Interestingly though, I could read from a piece of my own writing in front of an audience, if required to, and answer questions about it — albeit with butterflies.

It’s interesting to consider how much we may be drawn to a particular form of creativity because of the kind of personality we have, introvert or extrovert.

And it’s also worth thinking about to what extent we choose our medium based on the degree of control we are prepared to relinquish. That is, how many people we are prepared to share the actual creative process with.

(All this is supposing that when we create, we even have an audience in mind, as opposed to just creating for ourselves.)

There are so many different forms of creativity in this world — I haven’t even touched on cooking, or sewing, or photography, or gardening, for example. I’d love to hear your thoughts about different forms of creativity and their innate degrees of separation from their audience, and how much or little this might influence our participation in them.

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