Relationships in the arts are complicated. You may be very friendly with a fellow painter and also quite envious of her. You may actively dislike a gallery owner or a collector but decide that he is too valuable to cast aside, maybe because he is your only advocate or your only customer. You may respect your editor’s opinions but despise the rudeness with which she delivers them. There may be no such thing as a genuinely straightforward relationship anywhere in life, but relationships in the arts are that much more complicated and shadowy.
Let’s try to tease out fifteen sensible rules for marketplace relating:
1. You can’t succeed in the marketplace without the help of others. You can do whatever you like in your mind and you can do whatever you like in the studio, but if you want an audience, then you need help in the marketplace. Even if you engage in the equivalent of self-publishing, you still need audience members if you want to feel successful. So, the first rule is that you can create as if you were on an island, but as soon as you want to share your creative efforts with others, you are embroiled in the world of others. There is just no getting around that.
2. Your side of the relationship equation is up to you. You get to decide how you want to be in your relationships, even if you feel pressured to be someone else. You get to decide if you want to be honest and straightforward even if others aren’t, if you want to be polite and diplomatic even if others aren’t, if you want to be quiet and calm even if others are stirring the pot and making dramas. It may not prove easy to be the person you want to be at all times and in all situations, since the marketplace has a way of throwing us off our game, but you can nevertheless hold the intention of trying your darnedest to be the “you” you would most like to be.
3. Upgrade your personality. You can’t be the “you” you want to be in relationships if you’re an addict, if you’re running too scared, if your unhealthy narcissism has outstripped your healthy narcissism, if you approach life too defensively. We’ve been chatting throughout this book about the need to create a powerful, upgraded “you” that is equal to the challenges of a life in the arts. This is especially true as you begin to deal with the high-pressure dynamics of interviews, appearances, editorial meetings, and the other features of relating in the marketplace. Try not to make those already-tense interactions tenser by showing up as a weaker version of yourself.
4. You do not have to be real in all your professional dealings with others. You can make calculated decisions that in your marketplace relating you will act friendlier than you actually feel, put on a more optimistic, positive face than the one you wear at home, not let people know about your secret reservations about your work or your secret doubts about their expertise — in short, you can and should create a persona that serves you.
5. Know your intentions, and choose them wisely. Do you want to ensure that your editor knows she’s made a silly mistake, so as to get even with her for all the times that she’s pointed out your mistakes, or do you want to keep working with this editor? Do you want to blow up your relationship with your gallery owner because you’re embarrassed to tell him that you don’t have paintings ready for your show, or do you want to do the smart thing, which might be to buy yourself more time and turn the negative into a positive by gushing about how wonderful your paintings will be, albeit a little late? If you come from your shadowy place, from a defensive place, from an unaware place, you’re likely to ruin marketplace relationships that may be fragile to begin with. Be aware, and try to arrive at some smart decisions about your intentions.
6. Expect people to come with shadows. Everybody you deal with is a human being who comes with all the baggage that human beings come with, including hidden agendas, thin skins, passive-aggressive tendencies, self-interestedness, and so on. These everyday shadows do not disqualify them — if they did, no one would be able to deal with anyone. People come with light and shadows. Try to enjoy the light even as you stay aware of the shadows. If a person proves too shadowy and difficult, that’s one thing, but if she remains in the wide middle range that most people occupy, just learn to deal with her troublesome but ordinary shadowiness.
7. Be strong when you need to be strong. It may be smart and strategic to be pleasant, easygoing, and low maintenance in most of your marketplace interactions. But you also need to be strong when strength is required. If a certain moment calls for assertiveness, find that iron inside you. If your publisher wants to change the title of your book at the last minute to a title you just can’t tolerate, speak up. You may have no real say in the matter, and all you can do if they won’t budge is to cancel the contract, but by standing up and speaking your mind there’s a decent chance you can positively influence the outcome. You may have to shift from genial and agreeable to hard-nosed in a split second. Get mentally ready for such eventualities.
8. Make conscious decisions about who should get more of your time and who should get less. That is, be strategic about the importance of people in your networks and your universe. If somebody is pestering you with question after question for a print interview and you find yourself spending more time responding to those questions than chatting with your editor about the revisions she’s suggested to your novel, you are letting a squeaky wheel derail you. Decide on how you want to relate to people not on the basis of their aggressive demands but rather on the basis of what strategically serves you.
9. Ask questions. Marketplace players have plenty of reasons for not always being clear. They may offer you a publishing contract but prefer that you not know that their small press is on its last legs and that your book might never be published. Therefore, they leave out of the conversation any mention of your book’s publication date. If you notice this omission, your choices are to act like the omission must have been an oversight and nothing to worry about or to judge the omission a red flag and ask, “When will the book be published?” If you take the first route, you may be setting yourself up for big trouble, trouble such as the publishing house holding your book for a year or two and then announcing that it can’t publish it. If, on the other hand, you ask, you may not be happy with the answer, but you will be in a better position to decide whether or not to proceed with this publisher. Ask questions, even if you feel one-down, even if you feel embarrassed to ask, even if you’re not sure that the question really needs asking. Err on the side of clarity.
10. Ask for help. If you’re having trouble figuring out how to reach someone you think would prove a wonderful endorser of your book, ask your editor to help. If you want to make contact with a journalist but you think that the contact ought to be made by your gallery, ask your gallery owner to reach out to the journalist. If you want to perform with someone and you have a friend who knows that someone, ask your friend to introduce you. If a deadline is approaching on a residency application and one of your referrers hasn’t gotten around to writing a letter of recommendation yet, ask the person directly for the help you need, namely, a timely recommendation. Ask for help, and ask for what you need.
11. Negotiate. It is part of our repertoire of relationship skills to negotiate, but we tend not to use that skill with marketplace players because they intimidate us and because we fear that if we ask for anything, the deal will vanish. But if you’re polite, careful in how much you ask for, and not attached to the outcome, you will discover that in virtually every case you will get more than you were first offered. You might get a few thousand dollars more on your book contract, a slightly better cut on your split with your gallery owner, more advertising for your concert, or even just more time, say, by negotiating the delivery date of your book or the recording date of your album. Get used to negotiating: politely, carefully, and matter-of-factly.
12. Do not give yourself away. If someone you know in an arts organization asks you to volunteer your time and energy in support of something they are doing, think twice before agreeing. Of course it is great to be of service, and being of service is one of our prime meaning-making opportunities. But it is one thing to serve by supplying a guest blog post in support of an event and another to serve by spending a full year organizing a conference. Be very clear about what the commitment would amount to, check to see if you are tempted to agree just because so little else of interest is going on in your life, and make sure that you don’t cavalierly give away your time and your energy.
13. Try to make your personal relationships support your art intentions. Let everybody in your house know that you are an artist, in case somehow they didn’t pick up on that already, and that you need a certain amount of time and space in which to work and a certain amount of unconditional support from them. If they’re old enough to take care of themselves in the morning, let them know, for example, that for those first two hours of the day they can make their own waffles and pick out their own clothes. Smile as you say these things — but get them said.
14. Prepare simple answers to difficult questions. It is much easier to relate, both to friends and family members and to marketplace players, if you’ve prepared answers to the common questions you’ll be asked, such as “What are you writing?” or “Why are your paintings so violent?” or “Why can’t I hear your music on the radio?” Say, for example, that you’re an independent filmmaker. What are you naturally going to be asked? “What’s your film about?” “Who’s in it?” “When will it be coming out?” “Did you have to use your own money to make it?” “How did your last film do?” “Can I get any of your films on Netflix?” And so on. These are obvious questions and, whether their intent is benign or malicious, they really should not surprise you. Just prepare simple answers and use them.
15. Do not unnecessarily burn bridges. If an editor rejects a manuscript, thank her politely and keep her in mind for the future. She is already one of those important people in your life, a marketplace player who actually bothered to read something of yours, and it is not at all outside the realm of possibility that she will buy something from you down the road. Even if you have to sever a relationship, try not to burn it to the ground. You may well be seeing that face again!
You want to protect yourself in your relationships, but you also want to be open to relationships, because without them you can’t have the life in the arts that you want. You want to learn how to forge relationships, maintain relationships, and, when necessary, get out of them with as little drama as possible.
The Art of Self-Relationship
Nothing matters more than the way we relate to ourselves. In this section I’d like to provide you with a technique for entering into better self-relationship. The goodness of your other relationships — with loved ones, with marketplace players, with members of your audience, with everyone — flows from the goodness of the relationship you establish and maintain with yourself. That relationship is primary. So I want to teach you a method for keeping track of and improving your self-relationship.
It’s a journaling technique I call the Focused Journal Method. You can use this technique as your regular and best way to analyze any issue, from understanding why a creative project is stalled to deciding how you want to relate to your editor to solving a personal problem.
Let me run down the steps of the Focused Journal Method before examining them in some detail:
Step 1. You identify an issue.
Step 2. You examine its significance.
Step 3. You identify core questions.
Step 4. You tease out intentions.
Step 5. You notice what shadows get activated.
Step 6. You identify the strengths you bring.
Step 7. You align your thoughts with your intentions.
Step 8. You align your behaviors with your intentions.
Most people rarely follow these steps, as straightforward, sensible, and effective as they are in helping us take strong action. Just ask yourself: When was the last time you really examined an issue in a focused way and got all the way from naming the issue to understanding the concrete thoughts and actions that would support its solution? It’s probably been a long time, if ever.
Let’s go through these steps now one by one.
The first step in this journaling process is identifying an issue to work on. This sounds easy in theory — maybe you want to lose weight, build your business, create more regularly, do a better job of dealing with your distraction addictions (Facebooking, watching reruns of Desperate Housewives, and so on). But everyone has many issues they want to deal with, and identifying one issue to focus on leaves all those other issues in the lurch. What to do?
As with other matters we’ve chatted about, the key here is to choose one pressing issue and commit to working on it. If you like, you can begin by generating as long a list of these important issues as you need to — and then see if these issues can be clustered and refined into a smaller number, say three or four. Those three or four issues might become the issues you focus on as you journal. Maybe your list will look like this: finish writing my novel, lose twenty pounds, take more risks, and make some connections in the publishing world.
Clearly these aren’t all the issues in your life — but they are plenty to focus on. From those four you would choose one at a time to journal about, since it’s very hard to focus on more than one thing at a time. However you arrive at the issue you want to work on, you must arrive there. Until you do, you haven’t really started.
The second step is to examine the real significance of the issues you’ve chosen. Our minds can easily play tricks on us and cause us to believe that certain issues are significant to us even when they aren’t. Maybe we’ve identified as issues that we want to lose “that last ten pounds,” that we want to find a decent-paying part-time job, and that we want to make more time for friends. Are these really significant concerns to us, or are we merely repeating things we’ve been saying to ourselves for years?
There is no way to determine the true significance of an issue except by thinking about it, turning it around, and looking at it with fresh eyes. One way to go about this is to ask, “Do I mean it?” This sounds like “I say I want to lose those last ten pounds. Do I mean it?” If you come back with a resounding “Yes!” then you can feel reasonably confident that you do mean it. If you come back with a “No, not really,” or “I’m not really sure,” you have some more thinking to do.
If you’re not really sure, the next logical question is “Well, then, why do I keep pestering myself about this issue? What’s really going on?” You may discover that you don’t want to lose those last ten pounds because you fear that when you do lose them you’ll feel secure enough to leave your husband, an outcome you aren’t ready to contemplate. It takes courage to ask, “What’s really going on?” because you may end up with some disconcerting self-knowledge. All self-inquiry has this aspect of danger to it. So step two, examining the real significance of our issues, is really a call to courage.
The third step is to identify core questions associated with the issue you’ve identified. Let’s say that you’re a painter having trouble making sense of the next steps of your career. You decide that the issue you want to work on is marketing yourself more effectively. Your journaling process might sound like the following:
“Okay, I know that I need to market myself. This isn’t a ‘should’ from somebody else’s agenda but something that matters to me and that I have to own as important. So, what exactly am I supposed to do? There’s so much advice out there — and so few painters making it! But I know that successful painters do exist, so let me try to stay positive. . .
“I think the central question I need to address is, ‘Am I imagining that I’m going the gallery route, or am I taking some other route?’ If I go the gallery route, what is the smartest way to proceed? If I mean to take some other route, what are those routes? I can create a website — but will that amount to anything but a very pretty business card seen by no one? If I don’t get publicity and if I don’t make a name for myself, what good is a pretty website? And won’t galleries need an unknown like me to come to them with a name already — that crazy chicken-and-egg problem? So, doesn’t it make sense to focus on ‘getting a name’? But what does that mean?”
A journal entry of this sort represents a painter’s honorable attempts at getting some core questions asked. She hasn’t answered them yet — but the very act of naming them helps her gain clarity and points the way toward solutions. Once you’ve named your issues and articulated why they’re important to you, then you begin to tease out core questions that will help you meet the challenges you’ve identified.
The fourth step is to tease out intentions. Let yourself move from thinking about things, journaling about things, and wishing things would happen to intending something and making it happen. Not only should journaling help you clarify what is going on, but it should also help you tease out clear intentions that sound like “I intend to finish my novel by April 1,” “I intend to leave Harry before any more Thanksgivings arrive,” or “I intend to manifest my self-confidence every day.”
Until we arrive at clear intentions, we haven’t really mobilized our resources or committed to a course of action. There’s a world of difference between internally saying, “It would be great to get the garage organized” and “I intend to spend all day today getting the garage organized.” The first has a nice enthusiastic ring to it but no real teeth. The second sounds like sleeves being rolled up and work commencing.
You identify an issue or issues you want to focus on, you double-check to make sure you understand the real significance of those issues, and you ask yourself some smart questions to help you clarify your intentions. Then you announce those intentions loud and clear.
The fifth step is to notice what shadows get activated as soon as you announce an intention. Every time we create a strong intention — to build our home business, to finish writing our novel, to speak up in our family, to take bigger risks at work — we activate our defenses and the shadowy parts of our personality. We instantly start to talk ourselves out of our intention by saying things like “I’m too tired” or “I’m too busy” or “Next week would be better.” Such things regularly happen the instant we set a strong intention.
When you identify an issue that you want to work on and tease out an intention, notice what shadows appear. For each shadow you identify, talk yourself through how you want to handle it. For instance: “Okay, the thought of talking to John about turning the spare bedroom into a painting studio makes me really anxious. So I am going to learn (and really practice!) one good anxiety-management strategy this week — and then have that scary conversation.”
All your good plans are likely to come with some personality shadows. Expect those shadows, and learn to deal with them. If you ignore them, you’ll find your plans repeatedly derailed.
The sixth step is to identify what strengths you bring to the table. We’ve gotten into the habit over the past hundred years, coinciding with the birth of psychotherapy, of being very aware of our flaws and our weaknesses. With our self-talk we regularly put ourselves down, and we are very good at internally announcing how we aren’t equal to life’s challenges. This dynamic goes a long way toward preventing us from recognizing the undeniable strengths we also possess.
If we don’t actively identify and announce those strengths, we may forget we possess them. As part of your focused journaling process, after you identify an intention, also identify the strengths you can employ in realizing your intention. These might include your sense of humor (which you will need as you explore the gallery world), your skepticism (which will serve you in good stead as you peruse gallery contracts), your resilience (which you’ll need in order to deal with inevitable rejections), and so on.
The seventh step is to align your thoughts with your intentions. If your intention is to lose ten pounds and all day long you think, “This is too hard!” and “I am so hungry!” and “What’s that delicious smell?,” you’re unlikely to be able to stick to your eating plan. Once you’ve formed an intention like “I intend to lose ten pounds,” you will want to remind yourself that in order to stick to your eating plan, you will need to get a grip on your mind and think thoughts that align with your intention.
Not only do you want to stop thoughts like “This is too hard!” and “I am so hungry!” but you also want to introduce thoughts that positively serve you, such as “I am happy with my new eating plan” and “I am looking forward to my late-afternoon treat.” You create thoughts of this sort, and then you consciously think them throughout the day. Creating useful thoughts to think and then not thinking them doesn’t really serve you! A great Focused Journal Method exercise is to create some thoughts that align with your intention and then to indicate when exactly you will think them (for example, first thing in the morning, whenever you start to feel a little hungry, and so on).
The eighth step is to align your behaviors with your intentions. Every intention implies a set of behaviors. If it’s our intention to find a literary agent for our novel, that implies that we have written our novel, written a synopsis of our novel, located agents, and drafted a query email. These are the logical and necessary actions that connect to an intention of this sort.
Why don’t we behave in these straightforward ways if they are the logical and necessary behaviors we need to manifest? For countless reasons: that it scares us to think about communicating with agents, that it bores us to write a synopsis of our novel, that it daunts us to figure out which agents to approach. We don’t behave in these obvious and reasonable ways for all sorts of human-sized reasons.
By using your journal to identify what behaviors flow from your intentions, you make it very clear to yourself how you ought to be behaving. You may still have great difficulties following through, but just the act of naming those right behaviors and seeing them in print in front of you will bring you that much closer to realizing your intentions.
If you simply want to get down your thoughts and feelings in a journal, no method is required. If, however, you want to engage in some real, systematic self-inquiry in which you tease out issues and come to conclusions about how you want to think and act, then a method like the Focused Journal Method can prove invaluable.
Next let’s take a look at two faces of self-relationship.
The Buddhist Printmaker
A printmaker, who was also a practicing Buddhist, came to see me. He produced beautiful prints of traditional motifs like cascading waterfalls, scrub trees clinging to cliffs, and birds soaring in the mist. They sold brilliantly. But they gave him no joy. He didn’t even know why he created them.
“I must not be very advanced,” he said, shaking his head. “I still feel a need to have things matter. I know I should get over that!”
I had to smile a little. “Maybe you should give your prints away. That would be quite advanced. I have wall space for several of them.”
He didn’t laugh. He stared at me, thinking.
“The subject matter isn’t the problem?” he asked after a while. “It’s commerce that’s the problem? The selling? If I made prints and I didn’t need to sell them, do you think they would matter more?”
I shrugged. “What do you think?”
He thought about that. “No,” he finally replied. “If I were producing work that mattered to me, I wouldn’t mind selling it.”
“All right!” I continued. “So commerce isn’t the problem. For many visual artists the core problem is that with so much arresting natural imagery all around, why compete with it? Why make more images if there are things to see already, everywhere. Might that be it?”
Again he reflected. I could see him turning the question over. It is rare for people to actually bother to think — usually they respond with habitual, reflexive responses — and it is a very good sign when they do think. How else will solutions come?
“No,” he replied. “I understand what you’re saying. It’s a valid point, an important point. You can’t improve on nature, and nothing is really more arresting than what you can see while walking along a country lane or the street of any city. But a visual artist — a good visual artist —” He hesitated. “A great visual artist does something else. He does a one-in-a-million kind of thing — but I don’t know how to say what that is.”
I nodded. “But at least you know what you mean. So. . . tell me what you really want. Do you want not to want? Or do you want to do the great work you just alluded to?”
Again he thought for a long time. “Not so long ago I saw a retrospective of the drawings of George Grosz,” he said. “I was completely transfixed. There’s one watercolor called A Married Couple. For me, something about the whole Nazi era is captured in that watercolor. How can that be? How can you paint a watercolor of an ordinary couple and communicate so much about a hideous regime and a world war? Grosz could and did. I stand in front of that watercolor and marvel.” He stared at me. “I want to do work like that.”
“So you want to want?”
“I do.”
“Create a sentence that makes some sense of your desire to want and your philosophy of detachment.”
He pondered that. Slowly he nodded. “I get that. I need to really try — and if a certain image fails, so what? I go on to the next one. Really try — and then let go. ‘Really try and then let go.’ That works!”
“Okay! Now, about your waterfalls and mountains and trees —”
“They’re beautiful,” he interrupted. “But they’re not important to me. They’re beautiful but not important.”
“What imagery would be important?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“That’s the question.”
“So let’s get that answered.”
He laughed. “You don’t go very slowly, do you?”
“No.”
He closed his eyes and murmured, “What is my imagery?” He sat that way for a long time. I could see him picturing and rejecting imagery. Every once in a while he would shake his head, rejecting an image with particular certainty. Then something dawned on him. He turned it over several times in his mind’s eye. He nodded and opened his eyes.
“I have it,” he said. “I don’t want to describe it, but I have it.”
“Can you give it a shorthand name, so that we can talk about it?”
“Faces,” he said.
“Faces would matter?”
“Faces would matter.”
I could feel him hesitate.
“And?” I asked.
“And I can’t do them. I don’t have the power, the confidence, the fortitude, the commitment. I don’t have what it takes. I know they would matter, but I can’t manage them.”
“That’s a heartbreaking statement,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Which I don’t believe for a moment.”
He looked up suddenly.
“No,” I continued. “You haven’t tried yet. You fell into the reasonable place of making beautiful things that connected to a philosophy that attracts you. You have all the skills and heart you need — that shines through in your prints. To say that you can’t do the deep work that you just named and that would matter to you is preposterous.”
For the first time he laughed.
“No, you’re absolutely right,” he replied. “I just got afraid. That’s all. To put my real dream on the table and imagine failing at it — that was too scary to contemplate.” He shook his head. “But I don’t need to predict failure. I don’t need to think that! I know how to show up. I know how not to scare myself with bad thoughts — at least, I think I do.” He smiled. “I wonder if my practice will stand up to this challenge — to do real work.”
“Let’s predict that it will!”
He nodded.
“So,” I said, “what will you be doing?”
“Making powerful images that matter.”
“Yes.” I studied him for a moment. “Do we need to go over the details? How many hours a day you’ll work at this — any of that?”
He shook his head. “No. I know how to work. I’ve just been working on the wrong things.”
“Well, then! What do you want to plant in your head as your last thought for this session?”
He thought. “That I have work to do — and not just any work, because I’ve always worked. My job is to do this real work.”
“I believe I can let you go on that note,” I said.
He smiled, thanked me, and left.
My Wife Has the Problem
Jake, a would-be filmmaker in his early thirties, came to see me.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m good. I’m pushing along with my film — it’s getting there. It’s my wife. . . she has the problem.”
“What’s that?”
“The film is going to cost a lot. And we’re spending our own money on it. The money we’d saved as a down payment for a house.”
“She isn’t on board with that idea?”
“She hates it. We’ve had hellacious fights.”
“I don’t think I’d be too happy either!” I laughed. “But you seem to have made up your mind. About the film versus your relationship.”
“No! It isn’t like that at all —”
“You’re not holding the film as more important than the relationship?”
“No!” he said excitedly. “If she could just see where this will lead . . . how good this will be for both of us.”
I nodded. “You want her to change her mind and get on board with an open heart?”
“Yes!”
“While you’re spending the down payment for the house she wants. Did she save that money?” I asked.
He didn’t reply. “Part of it came from a small inheritance I got,” he finally blurted out. “This film could win an Academy Award!”
It’s hard not to be self-interested — or selfish. With the proliferation of reality shows, we are getting a very nice education in the grandiosity and selfishness of people, whether they are celebrity hairdressers, chefs, or real estate agents. Arrogant, narcissistic, defensive, combative — we are getting an eyeful. It was going to be interesting to see to what extent Jake had a conscience and some character.
“You’ve tried to find outside funding?” I asked.
He shook his head. “That’s way too hard! We have the money and we have credit cards and I can borrow more from my parents if need be — I can keep it all right inside our family and get the film done without having to go around begging.”
“Begging?”
He made a face. “That’s what it feels like!”
“You’ve tried it?”
“No.” He hesitated. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
“So it seems easier to spend your down payment than to investigate funding?”
“I don’t feel like you’re really on my side,” he said, shifting uneasily.
“Why? Because I think your wife’s concerns also matter?”
He got up abruptly and walked around the room. Finally he sat back down.
“I don’t think you understand the upside of this project. Everybody I tell about the concept loves it.”
“So tell me,” I said. “How much of the movie is made?”
“I have a rough draft of the script. A rough draft of most of the script — half at least.”
I nodded. “But you’ve already spent a lot of money?”
“On equipment. You need the right equipment. And I paid to have an original score composed — that’s been a mess! And I hired someone to scout locations. There are a lot of expenses before you can actually get started!”
I nodded. “Absolutely. But I’m trying to understand your approach to this. Why commission an original score when money is tight?”
He threw up his hands. “I could hear just the right music in my head. But the composer I hired didn’t really get it.”
I took a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me make sure I’m getting this right. Are you saying that you’re having problems making this movie, or are you just having problems getting your wife’s buy-in?”
He shook his head. “Well, it’s very complicated making a movie, and this is my first one. And I got off on the wrong foot with the composer and with this editor I hired to look at my partial script. And I was supposed to get better tech support on the equipment I bought — that’s been kind of a nightmare. But I just wish my wife was in this with me. She keeps nagging me, and I can’t concentrate on getting the script finished.”
“A lot of relationship problems,” I said.
He shrugged. “I just need people to do what they say. That’s all.”
“Your wife said that she would support you in this?”
“She did! In the beginning. I told her about my dream when we first met, and she was gung ho. Then some years passed while I was working on the script, and she changed her tune. She was all for it in the beginning!”
“Things changed.”
“My dream didn’t!”
We continued on in this vein. I renewed my wonder about the possibility and reasonableness of hunting for outside funding — not interested. I wondered if it made sense not to spend more money until he had a viable script ready — not possible. I wondered if there was any way his wife could get her house and he could get his film — no. I put on the table the question of whether he had entered into clear agreements with the composer, the location scout, the editor, the tech support people — of course he had. Everything was fine, if only his wife would second the motion.
Some of the silences grew very long. He had less to say — he knew what I was thinking. He knew that I was thinking that he had the problem. He couldn’t wait to leave. Finally our time was up and he got his wish. We did not set up a second appointment.
Years ago I worked with court-mandated clients who had to return even after I confronted them — but no court had sent Jake to see me. Unlike those court-mandated clients, Jake was free to make his movie and disrespect his wife. I didn’t expect to see Jake again — or his movie.
The Art of Relationship
Continue your investigation of right relating by answering the following questions:
• What are the key relationships in your life?
• What are the key relationships in your creative life?
• What additional relationships would you like to cultivate for the sake of your creative life?
• How will you go about finding advocates and supporters of your creative work?
• Where would you like to improve in your relating?
• Most crucial, how will you go about making those improvements?