The power of the Muses is nothing compared with that of big bill
when you have no money.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
“I’m a syndicated cartoonist; nothing focuses my creative inspiration [sic] like a blown deadline — and I bet it’s like that with all other artists, especially the serious ones, because, like, I’m a serious artist, no really, I totally could do that, but I chose not to, but if I did, I’m sure nothing would focus my creativity like the absolute need to make a sellable work, pronto — heh, I do that every day, the whiners, and no one ever even notices!”
I guess I’m a bit cynical, my first thought was that this art stuff isn’t working and I need to go a different direction, not an inspiration to create…..
When I was working full time writing, I’d get wannabes asking me about writer’s block. I’d tell them the cure for writer’s block “Quit your day job.”
I have an accounting client that lately drives me a bit too crazy when I go there. (She is in her 80s and probably should no longer be in business, but having had some clients whose wives made them retire and within a year they were completely confused and dead by the second year, I would not tell her to stop working.) She pays me quarterly. Sometimes it is the quarter month and I really don’t want to go. Robert comes up with reasons for me not to go that month (like too much snow). My reaction is “I have to go. We need the money – now.”
George C. Scott provided the villain’s voice for a Disney animated feature. During a recording session, one of the animators asked what he saw as the motivation for his performance. Scott replied, “Alimony!”
Several of Heinlein’s latest novels were produced using the method depicted in this comic, with corresponding results.
haaa! i loved this! Nothing gets rid of writer’s or artist’s block like a bill or an approaching deadline! I live through this often.
Local sf (mostly) writer Bruce Bethke wrote the tie-in pb to the bomb WILD WILD WEST movie of a decade or so back. His old webpage used to have a link to his comments about each of his books. In the case of that one, clicking on the link took you to a picture of the roof of his house, and his only comment on the book itself was something like “I needed a new roof. The job paid for it. Isn’t it nice? Any questions?”
Meryl A: “having had some clients whose wives made them retire and within a year they were completely confused and dead by the second year”
Why do you think their wives made them retire? You may be confusing cause and effect here.
I thought this was pretty good. At first I tried to come up with some significance to the fact that the bill is medical related. The paintbrushes looked a little bit like shears so maybe it’s a Van Gogh reference. But then it hit me. It’s flying in the face of the “serious artist” mentality that it’s not about money but instead is inspired by daily encounters.
I took it in an entirely different way. I’ve had a lot of experience with people struggling with bills, and I figured that announcement would inspire him to paint a noose, or a bottle of poison, or a one-handed game of Russian roulette.
I wonder if the amount of time it takes to get this joke is inversely proportional to the number of professional creative types whose rent is directly tied to their output you know personally. I mean, I know a fair number of them, many of whom manage to maintain a within-spitting-distance-of-middle-class lifestyle. And some of them used to post daily word counts on their LiveJournals back when people had LiveJournals. One of them did, every day, word count, percentage of word count that was new writing versus revision, number of plot points resolved or made more complex, tea she was drinking while writing, and reason for stopping writing that day. Which was usually “RSI”, but occasionally was “finished the section”.
Anthony Trollope was famous for writing for two hours a day, precisely. He would get up, get washed and dressed and have something to eat, then start writing at, I dunno, seven or whatever, then, when the nearby Church clock struck nine, he would put his pen down even if he was in the middle of a sentence, and go off to his day job. I believe he never revised, either. One and done and to the publisher.
He turned out a LOT of books, most of which were bestsellers, and I’ve even read some today, a hundred and fifty years later. And they’re okay. I mean, the bits which don’t work are because they’re Victorian-era sentimentality, not because they’re badly written.
Seat in butt, pen on paper/fingers on keyboard, words on paper or screen. That’s how you be an author. While you will NEVER hear one of them say this out loud, I do get the feeling that other professional authors who turn out books on a regular schedule kind of roll their eyes at Pat Rothfuss and GRRM. They’ll never say it out loud, partially because they’re often friends with those folks, and genuinely like them, and accept that everybody’s process is different… but still — if you want to write a book, you put words on paper or screen.
I went where Mark M went – some sort of van Gogh reference. But now I see that bills might inspire a change in career to something that actually pays real money.
Maybe, I’m being cynical, but isn’t that a motivation to *sell* and not to *produce* and the two have nothing whatsoever to with each other.
Some people like to leave off right in the middle of something, rather than finish their thought, because the next day they can immediately pick up where they left off and recapture the momentum.
I have found that it doesn’t work for everyone.
woozy, you can’t sell what you haven’t produced.
“woozy, you can’t sell what you haven’t produced.”
Well, yeah, but I’ve found you can’t sell what you have produced either. And if the bills are due no amount of flurry of creative activity is going to make any difference, because there isn’t a built in market.
Powers – their wife, in each case,decided that they wanted them to retire and be with them.
I tend to think that the act of getting up every day as they always had and going to their store that they loved (it was obvious from they how they talked about their businesses and their attitude) was giving each of them purpose to stay alive. It was what each of them did – one a jeweler who loved to work on repairing pieces and fixing watches (real watches – more than just changing a battery) and the other a florist who would show me the arrangements he had done and show me how the flowers complimented each other.
In addition had there been something that caused either wife to make them retire, the wives would probably had made sure while the clients were alive to find out about their finances and not have needed me to come in and start going through papers to find everything for them. In one case the wife had never even written a check before.
I did not include a 3rd client who had light fixture factory. In his case his nephew decided that he needed to shut down the factory as client had made some bad investments in houses and nephew wanted to write off the losses of the band investments against the profit on selling the business assets as that is a different story. That client died also – even quicker than the others did.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The power of the Muses is nothing compared with that of big bill
when you have no money.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
“I’m a syndicated cartoonist; nothing focuses my creative inspiration [sic] like a blown deadline — and I bet it’s like that with all other artists, especially the serious ones, because, like, I’m a serious artist, no really, I totally could do that, but I chose not to, but if I did, I’m sure nothing would focus my creativity like the absolute need to make a sellable work, pronto — heh, I do that every day, the whiners, and no one ever even notices!”
I guess I’m a bit cynical, my first thought was that this art stuff isn’t working and I need to go a different direction, not an inspiration to create…..
When I was working full time writing, I’d get wannabes asking me about writer’s block. I’d tell them the cure for writer’s block “Quit your day job.”
I have an accounting client that lately drives me a bit too crazy when I go there. (She is in her 80s and probably should no longer be in business, but having had some clients whose wives made them retire and within a year they were completely confused and dead by the second year, I would not tell her to stop working.) She pays me quarterly. Sometimes it is the quarter month and I really don’t want to go. Robert comes up with reasons for me not to go that month (like too much snow). My reaction is “I have to go. We need the money – now.”
George C. Scott provided the villain’s voice for a Disney animated feature. During a recording session, one of the animators asked what he saw as the motivation for his performance. Scott replied, “Alimony!”
From a few days ago –
https://www.gocomics.com/raising-duncan/2018/05/19
Several of Heinlein’s latest novels were produced using the method depicted in this comic, with corresponding results.
haaa! i loved this! Nothing gets rid of writer’s or artist’s block like a bill or an approaching deadline! I live through this often.
Local sf (mostly) writer Bruce Bethke wrote the tie-in pb to the bomb WILD WILD WEST movie of a decade or so back. His old webpage used to have a link to his comments about each of his books. In the case of that one, clicking on the link took you to a picture of the roof of his house, and his only comment on the book itself was something like “I needed a new roof. The job paid for it. Isn’t it nice? Any questions?”
Meryl A: “having had some clients whose wives made them retire and within a year they were completely confused and dead by the second year”
Why do you think their wives made them retire? You may be confusing cause and effect here.
I thought this was pretty good. At first I tried to come up with some significance to the fact that the bill is medical related. The paintbrushes looked a little bit like shears so maybe it’s a Van Gogh reference. But then it hit me. It’s flying in the face of the “serious artist” mentality that it’s not about money but instead is inspired by daily encounters.
I took it in an entirely different way. I’ve had a lot of experience with people struggling with bills, and I figured that announcement would inspire him to paint a noose, or a bottle of poison, or a one-handed game of Russian roulette.
I wonder if the amount of time it takes to get this joke is inversely proportional to the number of professional creative types whose rent is directly tied to their output you know personally. I mean, I know a fair number of them, many of whom manage to maintain a within-spitting-distance-of-middle-class lifestyle. And some of them used to post daily word counts on their LiveJournals back when people had LiveJournals. One of them did, every day, word count, percentage of word count that was new writing versus revision, number of plot points resolved or made more complex, tea she was drinking while writing, and reason for stopping writing that day. Which was usually “RSI”, but occasionally was “finished the section”.
Anthony Trollope was famous for writing for two hours a day, precisely. He would get up, get washed and dressed and have something to eat, then start writing at, I dunno, seven or whatever, then, when the nearby Church clock struck nine, he would put his pen down even if he was in the middle of a sentence, and go off to his day job. I believe he never revised, either. One and done and to the publisher.
He turned out a LOT of books, most of which were bestsellers, and I’ve even read some today, a hundred and fifty years later. And they’re okay. I mean, the bits which don’t work are because they’re Victorian-era sentimentality, not because they’re badly written.
Seat in butt, pen on paper/fingers on keyboard, words on paper or screen. That’s how you be an author. While you will NEVER hear one of them say this out loud, I do get the feeling that other professional authors who turn out books on a regular schedule kind of roll their eyes at Pat Rothfuss and GRRM. They’ll never say it out loud, partially because they’re often friends with those folks, and genuinely like them, and accept that everybody’s process is different… but still — if you want to write a book, you put words on paper or screen.
I went where Mark M went – some sort of van Gogh reference. But now I see that bills might inspire a change in career to something that actually pays real money.
Maybe, I’m being cynical, but isn’t that a motivation to *sell* and not to *produce* and the two have nothing whatsoever to with each other.
Some people like to leave off right in the middle of something, rather than finish their thought, because the next day they can immediately pick up where they left off and recapture the momentum.
I have found that it doesn’t work for everyone.
woozy, you can’t sell what you haven’t produced.
“woozy, you can’t sell what you haven’t produced.”
Well, yeah, but I’ve found you can’t sell what you have produced either. And if the bills are due no amount of flurry of creative activity is going to make any difference, because there isn’t a built in market.
Powers – their wife, in each case,decided that they wanted them to retire and be with them.
I tend to think that the act of getting up every day as they always had and going to their store that they loved (it was obvious from they how they talked about their businesses and their attitude) was giving each of them purpose to stay alive. It was what each of them did – one a jeweler who loved to work on repairing pieces and fixing watches (real watches – more than just changing a battery) and the other a florist who would show me the arrangements he had done and show me how the flowers complimented each other.
In addition had there been something that caused either wife to make them retire, the wives would probably had made sure while the clients were alive to find out about their finances and not have needed me to come in and start going through papers to find everything for them. In one case the wife had never even written a check before.
I did not include a 3rd client who had light fixture factory. In his case his nephew decided that he needed to shut down the factory as client had made some bad investments in houses and nephew wanted to write off the losses of the band investments against the profit on selling the business assets as that is a different story. That client died also – even quicker than the others did.