🗣️ The below is a “transcript” of this episode, cleaned up for clarity and readability. I’m testing out various ways to make this podcast as accessible as I can for people, so please be patient with me as the dust settles.
안녕하세요, 친구들, and welcome to Creative Alchemy, a podcast about artistic wounds, feeling lost in translation, and the magic necessary to transform inspiration into art. I’m your host, S. Jae-Jones, but please call me JJ. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of the Wintersong duology and the forthcoming YA fantasy series, Guardians of Dawn, the first installment of which will be published August 2023.
Where does time go? Anyway, welcome to the inaugural podcast. This is my first time doing a podcast without a co-host. If you guys know my voice from other places, it would most likely be from the Pub(lishing) Crawl podcast, which I did with my very good friend, Kelly, who is a literary agent. And also with Kelly and our other friend Mike, we did a podcast introducing Kelly to Avatar: The Last Airbender. So I have previously always had somebody to bounce ideas off of and to talk to, but it's just me talking into the void now.
My dogs are at daycare today, so I am trying to get this recorded without some barking in the background. So if I sound a little bit scattered, I do apologize.
Anyway, before we get started, I wanted to talk a little bit about why this podcast. Partially it's because I'm lazy. Writing is very time consuming, and it taxes my brain in ways that talking does not. I guess it's the former theater kid and me; it's easier sometimes to think on my feet. That's kind of the the main reason I started creative alchemy.
But the other big reason was one of the questions I get the most often from people is how to turn an idea into a book. I probably could create some sort of workshop or a masterclass on how to do it, but I'm less interested in giving people a how-to than to get people to think — which is a little bit ironic because I'm lazy and I don't want to think for myself sometimes. But I think that's what I do best: push people and ask questions, so this is really a podcast about giving yourself the tools to turn your own creativity into works of art.
Anyway, for our first episode, I wanted to take a step back and talk about the meaning of art. Yes, hi, hello, it's sink or swim when it comes to keeping up with me and about ADHD, sorry about that. I do have an outline of points here that are in front of me, and I'm going to try my absolute best to follow them, but with me, tangents and detours are to be expected.
Back to the subject of art. Why art? Why this topic? The tagline of this podcast is the magic necessary to transform inspiration into art. But what is art? I wanted to talk about the meaning of art because we need to be on the same page before we proceed. Because if we are not agreed on the meaning of art, then whatever I say after this is pretty useless.
what is art?
So let's start with the big question: what is art? No, really, what is it? What distinguishes art from entertainment? From education? From enrichment? Or, heaven help us, from content?
When I talk to a lot of aspiring writers, I think I get a lot of people who focus on the product. They think a book, the physical object, is art. That's what I mean by product — not the story or the intangible, philosophical parts that go into a novel — but the things that you can hold. So these people might say a painting is art, or a piece of music is art. While that's not necessarily untrue, that's not the whole picture either.
So when I talk to these aspiring writers — the ones who focus on the product — many of them tend to focus on publication as a marker of art, which means they’re focused more on the end result than the process. They say things like, Well, art is good book. To which I'll ask, Well, what makes a good book? And then they'll give me a bullet point list of things that they learned about good craft — good prose, good dialogue, no prologues, blah, blah, blah, all the rules that you get in writing classes.
(This is the reason I did not want to create a course because I'm not interested in the rules. It's the slither-outer in me.)
But I'm not interested in craft as a marker of good art. You can be a technically proficient musician, but does that make you an artist? I can play the exact same piece of music by Debussy as Lang Lang, so why am I not a pianist playing in all the best concert halls around the world? There must be a difference between technicality, craft, and artistry, more to art than mere craft. That's the part I'm interested in.
So let's try to answer the question again: what is art?
Perhaps that question is a little too big, too broad. Let’s try something smaller, something more concrete: what does art do?
I think this is actually an easier question to answer. Art creates conversation. And not necessarily because it has something to say, but because the person experiencing the art has something to say about it. I think this is actually more crucial than the art/artist having something to say, because the emotional response a creative work evokes in a person will always outweigh the intentions of the artist.
For example, say you go to a museum and you come across a supposed work of great art, and as you stand before it, you realize you hate it. You hate the use of color, you hate the size — whatever the reason, it just evokes a strong emotion in you.
Compare that to when you walk into a museum, and on the other side of the room are a couple of pieces of art that are fine. Just fine. They're lovely landscapes, kind of boring, and you sort of just...move on.
I think the emotional response art evokes in the person experiencing it is really what defines art, because it is better to be loved or hated, as they say. The last thing you want to feel about anything is indifferent, especially when it comes to art.
This is why when I was an acquiring editor, whether or not a book was “good” from a technical standpoint mattered less than whether or not I felt something about it. Something could be clunky or awkwardly written, but if the emotional rollercoaster I went on was thrilling, then I didn't care. Craft can always be fixed. But that thrill? Well, I guess some people can edit that, but I never could.
So people might rag on books like Twilight or Colleen Hoover's oeuvre as being kind of trashy or terrible, but the fact of the matter is, people feel some kind of way about these books. People love it, or they hate it. Very few people feel indifferent about either Twilight, or anything by Colleen Hoover. These books create conversation. In this way, I think they're culturally relevant and, as much as people might hate to hear this, art.
what is good art?
If I define art as a piece of creative work that evokes a strong emotion in its audience, what is good art? I think this is the part where a lot of creative people actually get stuck. We hear “good” and we think “good on a technical or craft level.” But as I've explained earlier, art doesn't have to be “good.” Art can be bad. Dreadful, even. Subjectivity is a wonderful thing, isn't it?
So if good art isn't necessarily “good” on a technical level, then what is it? In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, the author Kazuo Ishiguro said:
Stories are about one person saying to another, this is the way it feels to me, does it also feel this way to you.
And I love this because the definition of good art is where the actual artist comes into play. To me, good art is when what the artist is trying to say aligns with the emotion experienced by the audience.
For example, say I'm writing a piece of work, and I'm writing to explore the effect isolation has on a growing mind by writing a story about a feral child, and the people who read that book and understand what I'm trying to say. When that alignment happens, that's when art is good. Or maybe good is actually the wrong thing to say because good, like any other moral judgment, is highly individual and highly subjective. Maybe what I really mean is that this is when art is successful. Art that succeeds in communicating its intent to its audience is successful art.
A while back, I wrote a retrospective on my debut novel, Wintersong, and I had to consider when I was writing the piece whether or not my book was successful as a work of art. And ultimately, by the end of that essay I said yes. I had something I wanted to say about creativity, about feeling misunderstood, about being unheard, and while it might not have resonated with everyone who read it, those who got it, got it, I still get people who email me, who message me, who send me fan mail, talking about how that book made them feel seen. That is the reason I started writing in the first place, but it's also why I think that book was successful. It might not be a runaway blockbuster, and there may be people who absolutely hated that book — and there is, in fact, a lot of people who absolutely hate Wintersong — but that doesn't matter because my intention and my intended audience saw eye to eye.
And that's the reason we started creating in the first place, isn't it? It doesn't matter how many people understand what you're doing as long as one person does. You only need one person to start a conversation; otherwise, you're shouting into the void.
(Like I’m doing right now, talking into a podcast. It’s just me.)
the importance of art
So why am I so fascinated with the meaning of successful art? Why is it so important to me? Well, I guess this topic has been on my my mind a lot recently, especially with the Discourse that’s risen around AI. But truthfully, I've been mulling over the definition of art for a lot longer than that.
One of the pieces of advice I used to give authors who had just sold their debut novels was to find a hobby, one that could satisfy their creative urges without being bound by the need to get paid, or any other sort of external validation, like awards, good reviews, bestseller lists, sales numbers, that kind of a thing. I still give that advice to new authors, but the reason has shifted a little bit. Or maybe that's that the reason has its own reason. It's a matroyshka doll of reasons, I guess. But I give that piece of advice because you need space for yourself free from external validation, where you are free to create. Because if you create only to be witnessed, to be affirmed, to be consumed, then your art suffers.
We’ll take take one of my hobbies, photography, as an example. If I am so focused on getting enough views on my photos, on getting likes, on getting the algorithm to promote it, on getting enough people to like it or whatever, then I'm not creating for me. I'm creating for other people, for it to be consumed by other people. And that's what I mean by art suffering. I feel like my art in all ways — not just writing — has suffered greatly because I've been mistaking art for content.
Content is king, as they say, especially on social media. People talk about what makes good content, what attracts people to your content, how you can better your content, how to batch a month's worth of content in one day, etc. It's so easy, I think, to fall into this trap of creating content for the sake of being relevant, especially if you're a creative person trying to bring eyes to your work. You think If only I create content that sticks, then people will know who I am and then they will seek out my creative work. Even I fell into this trap, and I'm a troll, so I thought I'd be kind of resistant to doing any of this sort of stuff.
I've had a lot of conversations about content with my very good writer friend,
, trying to suss out the difference between art and content. She once asked me, What is the difference between art and content? I said capitalism.(If you've had any conversation with me, then you probably know that capitalism is my answer to all the ills of the world.)
What I mean by capitalism being the difference between art and content is that one is created solely to be consumed and the other is created to foster conversation. If art evokes an emotion in the audience, then content only exists to be consumed by the audience.
Think about it: if you're scrolling through social media, if you're watching a YouTube video, if you're doing what whatever, do you feel very strongly about the content that people put on there? I mean, you can, it's not that you can't, but it's very rarely that content evokes any emotion except a kind of momentary bit of entertainment before you scroll on.
And that's kind of the problem. This isn’t to say that there isn't overlap between art and content because there is actually a lot of overlap. But when it comes to producing the content I'm putting on my Instagram versus the content I'm producing in this newsletter, one is clearly just intended to be consumed, while the other I'm putting out there in the hopes of starting a conversation with someone.
The real problem is we're treating art as content, or we are creating content instead of art. I have a whole complicated theory about this — and maybe I will save some of my spicier takes for the podcast episode that's just for my paying subscribers. But creative effort that solely exists to sell something is content. Where I think we get tripped up is that content does require creative effort. The pieces I write for my newsletter, the photographs I take for my Instagram all take creative effort, but I'm not doing it for me. I'm clearly doing it to sell myself. To sell my brand.
I don't do that with my art.
I don't do that with the books I write. I write those to execute a creative vision I have in my head. I think in the past couple of years, during this whole influencer era, when everybody online is called a Creator (something that I absolutely loathe), I forgot that I'm looking to forge a connection with someone with my creativity, instead of trying to sell someone on it. This mentality comes from social media, because social media will do that to a person. Money will do that to a person. I think being published absolutely didn't help things for me. And cultural capitalism will do that to a person.
The fact that capitalist principles have infected absolutely every aspect of our society has basically ruined my relationship to art. It just reduces my worth as a human being to whatever value I can provide for a consumer. I become reduced to content to be consumed, not an artist with something to say. Sounds pretentious when I say like that, like the fancy-schmancy writer in a black turtleneck, and a red beret smoking French cigarette goes through holder. (Not that I haven't worn that exact outfit, though.)
My creativity is my humanity. It's not something to be consumed, or reduced to something to be consumed. Not reduced to an object or a value or a product. It’s human nature to want to create, to communicate, to connect. We want to express ourselves and we want to be understood when we do so. Some of us express ourselves directly in conversation. And some of us express ourselves in song, in paint, words on a page, with crochet needles and yarn. However we do it, we still want to express ourselves and be understood and that's part of human nature.
conclusion
Anyway, that's why I wanted to talk about the meaning of art for this first episode. A little bit heavy, but I think it's kind of important we get on the same page. And I think it's important because I think we lose ourselves bit by bit to the ever-devouring maw of consumer-capitalism. And I just want to in its teeth a little. The troll in me just wants to rebel, just a teensy bit, and reclaim art for myself.
That’s all for this episode of Creative Alchemy. And as I always tell myself, Take your art seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously. Until next time, 친구들.
credits
Theme music is BTS Euphoria Lo-fi by Smyang Piano
Creative Alchemy: Art