The challenges of a creative career

What is it like to be a writer, illustrator or creative? Is it days spent communing with your imagination, weaving stories or creating beauty that will delight audiences and reward you with handsome royalty cheques, bestseller status and shiny awards? Sometimes, that happens, but for most creatives, the reality is quite different.

Common emotional challenges for creatives

Here are some of the commonly experienced emotional and well-being challenges of creative work.

Rejection

All creative work is personal, which is why rejection can cut deep. Your novel being rejected can feel like you are being rejected by powerful, remote entities – agents, editors – who you cannot influence. It can poke at old wounds, connecting you with a childhood of being criticised or inadequately noticed by your parents or teachers, after spending hours making a drawing you hoped they would love.

Creativity is never on tap

Creatives can never agree on where creativity comes from. It is elusive. New ideas cannot be forced or conjured up as and when you need them. This is inconvenient, especially if you are squeezing your creative work into stolen hours around other commitments and another job. The fear that you have ‘dried up’ can be creatively paralysing, too, ensuring that ‘drying up’ becomes more likely. When creativity falters, your confidence can be shaken, and old narratives around how good, smart, or entitled to belong you are may become painfully activated. 

Financial anxiety

Earning from creative work is not easy, and earning consistently is even harder. Financial anxiety is often a feature of creative work. In addition, AI is casting a shadow over the future of many creative roles, particularly writing, and this beleaguered, uncertain atmosphere can feel destabilising and provoke anxiety.

Surviving development hell

Having spent weeks, months, years on your work, you may have to wait weeks, months, years to hear anything from publishers. This can leave you feeling at best in limbo, at worst, resentful, demoralised, or even depressed. Silence and indifference can be harder to bear than rejection.

Keeping the faith

Any creative work requires that you keep faith in yourself, your talent, and the work you are creating. Resilience is essential, too, but both are under attack from the isolation, imposter syndrome and anxiety that can accompany a creative career.

Why creative work can feel isolating

Creative work is often lonely work. You are self-employed and may also work alone, at home. No colleagues, no chat round the water cooler, no sick pay. You may have an agent, but contact with them is likely to be intermittent. Ditto an editor. It is you, and the blank page, and that can feel very isolated and pressured.

Working into the void

A lot of creative work is speculative and unpaid, or predicated on a small advance but the possibility of earning later from royalties. So, you are chancing it every time you spend time on a new project. There is no guarantee that your work, effort, and time will lead to personal gain. 

The role of social media

Social media can be a useful way to promote your work and connect with other creatives, but not if the only posts you see are of them winning an award, a record-breaking advance, or a spot on the bestseller lists. These sorts of posts can leave you feeling demoralised, deflated and also jealous. 

When creativity stalls

Some careers are widely acknowledged as challenging or stressful – nursing or teaching, for instance – but creative work is often romanticised, or at the very least, seen as desirable. So, when authors and creatives struggle with their work, they may also experience shame, guilt and inadequacy for struggling at all. Why aren’t you coping? This isn’t a ‘real’ job, after all. The more the work is talked up as cool or romantic, the more they may talk down, hide or not feel entitled to their own experience of struggling with it.

What can help

Reach out to peers for support. Connect with other creatives with whom you can freely and frankly share your experiences. 

Be clear on why you are creating and what success would look like. Then celebrate your successes.

Set realistic expectations. Creative work is challenging and does not happen in order. Be kind to yourself about what you can realistically achieve in an hour or a day.

Use social media with caution. Remember the risk of ‘compare and despair.’

Take time out for play and pleasure. You cannot pour from an empty jug, but you can top it up by spending time doing the things you love.

How therapy can support creative professionals

Speak with a therapist. When the challenges of a creative life connect with deeper feelings and beliefs about yourself, leading to low self-esteem, or when these challenges are impacting your relationships or causing family issues, consider talking to a therapist.

Together, you can bring to awareness the unique ways your work pulls at you, and gently build back resilience.