Turn your thinking upside down: begin with the business model

The creative impulse is such that, when struck by new inspiration - an idea, mood, theme, characters, or a story - suddenly your mind buzzes a million miles an hour, urging you to dig in and put it down on paper while the creative muse is with you.

So, it no doubt sounds counter-productive when I say: stop right there!

As a creative person you have no shortage of good ideas. In fact, the opposite is likely true: they hover at your periphery, haunting your every move, trying to seduce and/or guilt trip you into paying attention to this idea over everything else in your life. The problem is, when you devote time first to the creative impulse, without heed to the pointy end of the stick, you get trapped into the cycle of “struggle.”

You will devote countless weeks, months, even years to the project, forced to keep another job to pay your bills, exhausting yourself with overwork, damaging your relationships, and at the end of it: you will be in exactly the same position as when you started.

However, if you identify a profitable business model first, it is much easier to develop a creative idea that will fit over it, thus satisfying your artistic urge as well as financial needs. Please don’t get scared off by the words “business model”... this can be a creative, innovative, and fun process, it’s just a matter of rethinking the order in which you do things.What exactly do I mean?

Epiphany: making creativity work financially.

Obviously I completely abandoned this blog long ago, but I’ve decided it’s time to start over with weekly updates. I’ve moved beyond being a struggling “writer” to being a writer/director/producer, and even “CEO” of a new entertainment company. (Mind you, all it costs is about $500 to start up a company and call yourself CEO, so let’s not take that as any sign of success – the “struggling” title still holds! For now, anyway... )

The reason I’ve decided to resurrect this blog, is that I’ve found a new purpose for it. This year has been one where I’ve had to confront the issue of why I continue the creative struggle when there is so little reward in it. How I had been living was unsustainable – working long hours and giving up sleep attempting to meet both creative needs and financial responsibilities, and feeling like a failure on both counts. This has meant a lot of soul searching, looking down new pathways, trying to find a solution. And I now have some great ideas that may be just that.

This blog is going to catalogue my attempts to move beyond the “struggling” point by putting these techniques and ideas into action. If you are a struggling writer (or struggling creative artist in any form), I hope you can join me on the journey, putting the same principles into practice for yourself, or making your own suggestions, so that we can all rise above bittersweet “gift” of creativity to earn a healthy balanced living from our talents.