Sarah Rhea Werner:

This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, episode 123, Starting Ugly with David duChemin.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Welcome back again this week friends. I am so excited to be speaking with you as always. I am extra, super special, super special excited. I don’t even think that’s a thing, but I’m extra excited to talk today to David duChemin, who is a best selling author, photographer and a bit of a firebrand, per his words, where the creative life is concerned and I completely agree. His podcast, A Beautiful Anarchy, was my introduction to David. It is all about the joys and challenges of the creative life and a reminder that you’re not alone. Especially if that creative battle feels like it’s something you have to face every day. There is just so much of a crossover between the subjects that we talk about. I’m so excited to bring David to you today.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Just a few more things. David did spend the last 15 years traveling the world as a humanitarian photographer and leading creativity workshops in all seven continents, so kind of a big deal. His adventures have taken him through winters in Russia and Mongolia and a summer on the Amazon, as well as months among nomads in the Indian Himalayan and remote Northern Kenya. David has a 12 year past history in comedy that I think is also, it applies to the present as well and brings a dynamic and engaging presence as a presenter in workshops, on camera or on stages for corporations like Apple and Amazon. Again, kind of a big deal.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

His books, you need to check out his books. Within the Frame, The Soul of the Camera, speak to his current life in photography. But we’re also going to talk about a few of David’s books that apply to the writing practice, one of which you may have caught my previous Write Now and Dear Creators newsletters, talking about what I have discovered from the incredible insights of his book, Start Ugly.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

David, hi, hello and welcome to the show.

David duChemin:

Hi Sarah. Thank you. That was quite an introduction. I feel, listening to that, I’m excited about this show. What’s he going to say?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I’m excited to talk to… well hey, who knows? Yeah, so hi. Now I’m just, after reading this beautiful novel about you, I’m so excited to dive into absolutely everything. I’m also excited. I have my cat, Madoori who I’m gently going to place on the floor. Oh I know, I love you. Okay, angry cat noise is over hopefully. David, welcome to the show. I would love for you to begin just telling us, not a little bit about yourself, but I want to hear a little bit about what it means for you to live a creative life.

David duChemin:

Gosh, what a way to start easy, hey?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I like to jump in.

David duChemin:

Just, no kidding, pull the pin on the grenade and lob it over the fence. I’m all about making. I love making things, like the tangible stuff. The photographs, the books and that sort of thing. But for me, as much as I love the thing, the product that results at the end, you get the book in your hands and you publish the podcast, whatever it is. For me, the real joy and challenge is in the actual process of making. I really believe that art making and I don’t capitalize the word art. Art belongs to everyone. Creativity belongs to everyone. For me, the great joy and challenge of it is the doing. It’s about transformation for me.

David duChemin:

I believe that we make our art, but our art in the making, it makes us. It transforms us. Assuming you’re not just going in circles and repeating yourself over and over and over again. When we sit down to write something or to make something, it forces us into a space where we’re confronting maybe the things that we don’t want to confront. My first book, the title of which I shamelessly stole for my podcast, my first book about this stuff was called A Beautiful Anarchy. The subtitle was When The Life Creative Becomes The Life Created. I really believe that our greatest piece of art can actually be our life itself. It’s everything. It’s in making a difference. It’s in our relationships, it’s in the impact that we make for other people. That, to me is what it means to live artfully and creatively, to bring transformation in whatever we do. That sounds really lofty. I don’t mean it in like always just the big stuff. I just mean in the daily contacts we have with people and with the small things that we make. For me it’s about impact.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I’m going to give you space to keep going if you want, but I also have so many questions that have sprung from that question.

David duChemin:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah go for it.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I made the mistake of… hi. We’ll just edit that out. I made the mistake of reading Start Ugly before A Beautiful Anarchy, so I was introduced to you first by listening to your podcast, A Beautiful Anarchy, which was recommended to me not only by my good friend, Sean Howard, but also my friend Jordan Cobb, so shout out to both of them as thanks for introducing me. The first one of your books that I picked up was Start Ugly. That was where I was introduced to this completely mind blowing idea. Again, I hadn’t read A Beautiful Anarchy yet, but this idea that creativity isn’t all about making a masterpiece.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

You say this very wonderfully in your book. It’s not about making a masterpiece. It’s not about making things so much as it is creating ourselves. That was just such an eye opening thought for me, about how… that’s why I wanted to start with this question, because really what we’re doing when we’re creating is creating our lives and ourselves. That really gave me a little bit of slash a lot of peace with the fact that I didn’t have to be so precious with my art. I love that you also talked about decapitalizing art and taking away that capital A from art. Now I’m just rambling because I am so excited about this concept. That was such a huge breakthrough for me. How did you come to that idea? How did you come to that realization that you weren’t just composing photographs and writing books, but you were creating yourself?

David duChemin:

Well my life’s been a bit of a zigzag. When I left… I’ve always been fairly introspective. I’ve always wanted to make a difference. When I left high school, I went to the Amazon, I spent a summer building a school for street kids and fooling around and just whatever teenagers would do if they were spending a summer on the Amazon. When I came back, I went and I embarked on a what ended up being an effort to cram a four year degree into five years, but it was a theology degree. Talking about creative thinking.

David duChemin:

I spent five years in exile on the cold, Canadian Prairies with this stuff, but with the intent that I wanted to help people. But those studies introduced me to contemplative sources from 2000, 3000 years ago, up to now so reading poetry and reading scriptures of various kinds. I’ve always had this kind of contemplative thought. A thread that goes through all of that is the idea of redemption and transformation.

David duChemin:

One of the things that I sort of twigged to very early is that there’s this idea that out… and I put it in the book, Beautiful Anarchy. There’s this idea in Latin, it goes [foreign language 00:08:15], which means out of nothing, nothing comes. You can sort of, you can look at that idea and you can use it as all kinds of justifications for all kinds of weird theology, but you can also look at it and kind of say, “Okay, that means that the art, the thing that is made, comes from the maker.” If we are making our art, we spend so much time concentrating our efforts on making the masterpiece, but it will only be as good as the artist himself or herself. The artists are the source of our work.

David duChemin:

I think we just put way too much pressure on ourselves to make the thing, rather than just letting ourselves… art making is a journey of being made. It’s a journey of transformation. When we get really precious about capitalizing the word art and about the thing that we’re putting into the world, we put so much pressure on ourselves. I wrote Start Ugly because I kind of felt like there are so many obstacles just to beginning the work. If we can just get it started, whatever it is. Whether you’re writing a book or making a painting or a sculpture. Whatever thing it is that you’re making, it’s going to happen the same way that we ourselves have become the people we are. It’s going to start kind of ugly.

David duChemin:

I don’t care how much you love babies, and I don’t have children, so here’s my bias, I don’t think every child that’s born into the world is… let me put it this way. I don’t want to call babies ugly per se, but we can all agree that they are only a hint of what they are going to become. You don’t look at that screaming, jelly covered, naked lizard in your hand and go, “Oh man, this one’s ugly. Let’s throw him back and start again.” You know that 30 years from now, this beautiful person is going to be a completely different thing.

David duChemin:

We are a result of our mishaps and our missteps and our stories and evolutionarily the result of our mutations. I think embracing mistakes and embracing the ugly starts, Anne Lamott talks a lot about writing (beep) first drafts. I think that there’s such wisdom and grace and possibility in looking at the beginning of a thing and giving ourselves the freedom just to see where it goes and to pursue… I have a business manager. In our meetings very often, one of us will say, “Okay I’ve got a really bad idea, but I’m going to put it out there.” Because so often, the first thing we do when we have a bad idea is we censor ourselves and go, “Oh no, that’s… “

David duChemin:

Well how do you even know? You haven’t even said it. You haven’t even written it down, you haven’t put it into the world and you haven’t subjected it to that great creative question, what if? What if I do this? Yes, that’s a terrible question, a terrible idea, but what if we tweaked it? What if it led to this? What if we combined it with that? I think we sabotage our own process because we mistake the beginning for the ending. We mistake the expectations of that beautiful masterpiece at the end for the pile of whatever crappy, raw materials we’re starting with and we throw our hands up and we go, “Oh, this one’s not working.”

David duChemin:

Well how do you know? You haven’t given it the time and the task of bringing all that ugly, raw material into the world and sort of digging through it and seeing what’s there is so different than the very end task, which is the refinement of the thing, when you do know where it’s going and you’ve kind of, you’ve hit the messy middle, you’ve made your way through that, but to mistake the beginning of the process for the end, I think sabotages more artists. I wanted to write a book that kind of gave a helpful nudge and a reminder that, you know what? It’s good that it’s ugly at the beginning. We should make it ugly. We should throw all the ugliness on the table, rather than trying to hide it.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Absolutely. It’s so beautifully said and it’s so beautifully said in the book as well. This just, wow. Everything you just said sort of set off an eruption of questions that I have for you. One of those questions is, there’s sense that this is such an ancient topic. People have been creating for forever. People have been making art forever. Part of me is just wondering, what’s wrong with us? Why haven’t we internalized this wisdom yet? That when you start it doesn’t have to be perfect. Is that just our impatience? Is that just the example that’s been set for you? Why are we like this?

David duChemin:

Well I can’t speak for you, Sarah but I just, I’m basically a doofus. I’ve decided that I’m just a bit of a moron. No, you know what I think it is? I think it’s that what we create always, unless we’re just repeating ourselves, what we create always happens in the context of the unknown. Even though we’ve been there before, even though we should know better and we should learn these lessons, we still, on the next go around, are like, “Oh yeah, but this one’s different.” It’s like we forget. We have selective amnesia. We forget how hard things are. We just kind of, we get to the next one and we’re like, “Oh why is this so hard?” Well it’s always been hard. It’s always, you’ve always been… because it’s the unknown.

David duChemin:

That’s I think why there’s such a temptation for creative people to repeat themselves, because it is known. You finally bushwhacked your way through the understory, you’ve cut a path and you’re like, “Yes, I know where to go. Let’s just camp out here and do circles around the campsite.” Because it becomes familiar. The problem is, the thrill of creativity, our best work happens when we’re wrestling through that unfamiliarity. Through that uncertainty. Yes, we’ve been doing this for centuries, millennia, but I think not only do we forget our own… the lessons that we keep learning over and over again, but I think when we look at those who’ve gone before us, or even contemporarily, we look at someone like Anne Lamott who is so honest and self-deprecating in her work as she talks about the writing process, if anyone can make us feel more human about this and more okay with it, it would be Anne, but yet we look at her and we go, “Well of course she feels that way. She’s amazing. She’s written all these books. She’s a New York Times best selling… she’s blah, blah, blah.”

David duChemin:

We have this internal script that dismisses all of these messages and ideas because maybe they seem like superhuman, maybe it feels like, “Well yeah, it applies to them, because they don’t have all of these problems. They’re not sitting at the keyboard, pulling their hair out the way that I am.” I think we kind of believe that we’re… there’s this kind of exceptionalism, but instead of… especially for creators. Instead of exceptionalism like, “I’m better than everyone else.” It’s an exceptionalism that’s sort of denigrates us. I think we just, maybe it’s just human nature. We just have to learn our lessons the hard way. Generally if you’re me, it’s kind of the hard way and also over and over and over again.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Oh no, same.

David duChemin:

That’s okay. I think when we stop being precious about this and acknowledge just how messy it is, it’s very liberating. I have no expectations on myself other than the ones that I put on myself or allow myself to absorb. But usually, even when I think it’s other people’s expectations, it’s usually just another version of my expectations. I think it just goes to our messy humanity and the fact that we really don’t know that, looking back it’s easy. “Well that book practically wrote itself.” Really? Do you remember how hard it was? When you’re staring down the next one, you’re kind of looking back at this romanticized version of what happened.

David duChemin:

Start Ugly for me has been, really has been about freedom. It’s been about just every time we start a new thing, it’s like, “This is terra incognita. We don’t know where we are, where we’re going.” And that’s the adventure. That’s the fun part. It might end in disaster. It might end in a really crappy book. But what if that is the step we needed to discover something about ourself? Maybe it’s a new skill, maybe it’s just we wrote one line that we went, “Oh, that’s the thing I want to write.” Then you scrap the other 60000 words and you start with that one line and it becomes the thing. It’s iterative. It’s evolutionary and because that’s the essential nature of creativity, it’s very freeing.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

It is. This was… my 19 year old cat is sitting on the notes that I made, but I have so many things that I’m carrying around in my mind from your book. You say the word iterative and even the name of your book, Start Ugly, when I first picked it up, I was like, “Well I’m not starting a project, but I do want to read this book.” It was really the cover that drew me in. I want to ask you a question about where in the heck you got this picture on the cover?

David duChemin:

Well let me answer that right away.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Yes please. I’m dying.

David duChemin:

Because my cover making process was also kind of an ugly process as well. I made a bunch of iterations. Finally, I just, I Google Image searched ugly because I wanted some ideas about where I could take this cover, because I wanted something that was kind of a little bit different and not precious, yet I also wanted something that was a throwback to a long tradition of art. The cover image is The Ugly Duchess. It goes back to 1513. It’s, I can’t remember the actual name of the woman that it is meant to be of. She apparently was a real woman. It was a parody. The longer I’ve lived with this cover, the more I’m like, “I’m not sure if it’s kind of funny, or if it’s a little bit unkind?” Nevertheless, she is a significantly, by our standards of beauty, a significantly ugly person on the exterior. I’m sure she was a very nice person on the inside.

David duChemin:

But I just, I was Google searching it. I really wanted an image that kind of grabbed people’s attention and made them kind of, if not physically recoil, kind of go, “Oh.” Like, “Oh yeah, that is kind of ugly.” Because we do have strange standards of beauty, don’t we? I think it applies to our creative process as well. We judge it as ugly, but what do we know? We’ve been in the weeds with the book we’re writing or the project we’re working on or the painting. At a certain point it’s like you lose all objectivity and you’re just like, “I don’t even know. Is this crap? Is it not?” Those were the thoughts that were kind of going through my mind when I just Google searched ugly and I saw this picture and I went, “Oh it’s perfect.” But again, like I said, now that I’ve lived with it for a while I’m like, “I haven’t decided whether this was a very nice painting or not.” But nevertheless, it’s stood the test of time. It has endured and who am I to say that it’s not good enough for my book?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Absolutely. Well it’s definitely the reason that I went with that one first. I had to know what was between these covers. I just, I had to know. That brings me to, before I sidetracked us and asked about this cover, I was thinking about, you had mentioned the word iterative and we talk about picking up this book and it being about beginnings, but it’s not just the beginning of a project that we’re talking about. It’s beginning every day. It’s having to start every day. You talk about this selective amnesia that we have, this exceptionalism. We face those challenges every day. We forget, “Oh this was really hard yesterday. I just remember being in flow and it feeling so good.” Then I sit down the next day and I’m like, “Oh the flow’s not here immediately and now I have all these things to fight and I have to start ugly all over again and didn’t I already do this yesterday? And how suscipient is this? And why am I like this?”

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Then we, well at least I start swirling down the, “Well maybe I’ll knock out some easy tasks first before I get to my creative work.” All of this is to say, I really appreciate the distinction of a linear process, where every day you’re starting but you’re carrying on from the day before versus an iterative process, where you actually are starting anew and afresh every day, having experienced a little bit of that amnesia overnight and realizing you have to get back into your project again and you have to rediscover the flow again. I was going to ask questions about flow, but I think what I want to ask is, how do you start every day and when you face resistance, when you face the exhaustion of having to jump into the fight one more day, how do you deal with that?

David duChemin:

Whiskey.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

All right, next question. No, I’m kidding.

David duChemin:

Well it’s infuriating. I mean, I hear it in your voice. You go up into wherever you write and you get in the flow. Things are going so well. The muse has shown up and then you leave for the day and you’re like, you turn to the muse and you’re like, “All right, you stay here.” Then you come back in the morning and she’s gone away. You’re like, “But she’s buggered off. I thought we were doing so well.” The way that I deal with it in my more mature moments, and every day does not represent this but is a change of thinking, that this is not… when I sit down in my chair to write and I’m quite disciplined, because I found that works for me. I put time on the calendar, I’m like, “Okay today between this time and this time, I am writing.” I’m very specific about whether I’m writing for my podcast or my latest book or whatever I’m doing.

David duChemin:

What has been sabotaging for me is when I sit down with the expectation that I am going to pick up from yesterday. That’s not what it is. It’s not producing. It’s not trying to create something great. I don’t have on my calendar a block that says write something great. I just have write.

David duChemin:

For me, it has really helped to shift the paradigm into kind of a mental model that involves exploration. It’s really sitting down and going, “Let’s see what comes out of the fingertips today. Let’s see where it goes.” Because inevitably, I mean I know the bigger themes of what I’m writing about. I know where I need to get or where I think I need to get. But sitting down with the, rather than this heavy expectation of duplicating the brilliance of yesterday, I sit down and to me it’s very… I think in metaphors and for me it’s like digging. I just get out my shovel and I start digging through the dirt. I know that the gold’s… I’m not going to sit down and get my shovel out and then look down and go, “Oh look, there it is. The gold. It’s all just sitting on the surface.”

Sarah Rhea Werner:

How nice.

David duChemin:

The gold is like, it’s way down there and you’ve got to shovel through a lot of dirt and a lot of weird stuff and you hit something and you think it’s gold and you find out it’s just an old thermos or something. You’re like, “Oh okay, well that’s not it.” But when I think about it in terms of exploration, in terms of digging, it encourages my curiosity, it lowers my expectations, because I know that I have the freedom to start ugly. Usually the more ugly I’m willing to start, the more quickly it all accelerates, because I don’t procrastinate. I don’t think, “Oh well, you know I should, maybe I’ll just check my email.” Or, “I’ve written 10 words. I think I’ll reward myself and go down and make more coffee.”

David duChemin:

It’s just, the mental games that we play with ourselves are really quite astonishing, but if you can just convince yourself that your task is not to create something amazing and polished, because that’s way down the road. Today’s task is just to take whatever you started with yesterday, set that expectation aside and go, “I wonder where it goes from here?” Because I don’t know. I really do not know where it goes from here. I might think I do but let’s face it. Folks, if you’re listening and you’re a writer, you know that very, very seldom does the work at the end of the day reflect where you thought it was going at the beginning. It’s like, you get to the end and you’re like, “Huh, so that happened.” Well if we can kind of assume at the very beginning that we have no idea what we’re actually doing and we just put it out there and we go, “Let’s see where it leads.” I don’t know.

David duChemin:

But there’s such freedom in that. Then if we don’t have the expectations, then the first goofy thing you write that isn’t quite right, then you’re not beating yourself up. Then that inner voice isn’t going, “Well that was stupid. That’s nothing like… come on. What are you thinking?” All those voices we carry around from, in my case, things my dad said or things kids in elementary school said. Those people have long forgotten they said those stupid things. “What do you mean what was I thinking, dad? I’m four years old. I was thinking four year old thoughts.” And yet I carry that voice around with me.

David duChemin:

If you can lower your own expectations and just go, “David, your job is to start ugly.” Who among us can’t write a really ugly sentence? Or make an ugly photograph or whatever it is that you do creatively. If that’s my job is to start ugly, I’m like, I’m already starting on a win. Look, I did it. Something really ugly. But it’s going to evolve. It’s going to get better and later on, yeah I’m going to go back and delete the first two paragraphs, three paragraphs, whatever. Maybe at the end of an hour of writing I only come up with a couple really great lines that I love and all the rest is crap. Well it’s not crap. It’s just the stuff that I needed to get out in order… it’s the stuff, the dirt I needed to move out of the way in order to get to the good stuff. I just find it really liberating. That doesn’t mean that I’m not filled with angst all the time. I mean, how would I create if I were not, but it’s kind of an angst management tool.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I love that, it’s an angst management tool.

David duChemin:

That might be the title of a blog post in the future. My angst management tool.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Please do that.

David duChemin:

I actually had, I had a, as a side note, I had a, because I do these, I teach these photography workshops. I’ve been writing blogs forever. At one point, someone, because I like encouraging people to comment and whatever. Someone finally put in my blog, someone wrote, “You know, I’m just, I’m done. I can’t deal with your… ” No, his line was, “Your angst is exhausting.” Now I’m a very positive person, but once in a while I… I’m also fairly transparent. I had written a blog post just about the challenges I was facing. I was photographing in Kathmandu and finding it challenging. His line was, “Your angst is exhausting.” I thought, “Boy, you think my angst is exhausting. You should try being me. I’m worn right out.” After that I thought, “I really need t-shirts that says my angst is exhausting.”

Sarah Rhea Werner:

It is.

David duChemin:

There’s the next great merchandising idea for someone out there.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I love it. Put it in your shop, I’ll buy 10 and give them away on the show.

David duChemin:

Done.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

It’s just, what a strange comment for you because this whole time that we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking, “How do you stay this positive?” Because part of what gets me when I’m creating is like, okay yes, you’re doing all this digging and there is a gold nugget at the very bottom, but is that gold nugget really worth all of the time and effort and pain that went into creating it? I know… that’s again why it was so freeing partially for me in reading this book, to think that, “Oh, it’s not about production. It’s about becoming. It’s about learning, it’s about embracing this process.” But at the same time it can get so frustrating when, oh at the end of the day, I worked so hard and I only have 10 salvageable words. You have that, you also have people who are ambitious and want to make things that are great. How do you, I guess did you intentionally and purposefully sort of implement this optimism? Or is that just something you’ve always had or something that you’ve chosen to do?

David duChemin:

That’s a really interesting question, I’ve never thought about it that way before. To put on a very old hat that I haven’t worn for a long time and to kind of go back to some of the thinking I did in theology school, there’s this idea that faith is the absence of doubt. I would transfer that to the idea that positivity is the absence of negativity, that optimism is… the person that’s optimistic is not a person that is pessimistic.

David duChemin:

I would actually argue that faith can only exist and it’s a reaction to doubt. It can only exist in the context of doubt. In the creative process, your faith and your ability to exercise that faith, it can only be there in proportion to the doubt that is there. Certainly that’s my experience. I choose to believe that, again it’s not an optimist, someone that says, “You know what? This is all going to work out.” Because I haven’t got the foggiest idea whether that’s true. I really don’t. But I do know that I love the journey. I love digging in the dirt and finding that unlikely thing and going, “Huh, I had no idea I was going to come up with this.”

David duChemin:

At the end of the day, knowing, to extend the metaphor well past its breaking point, I’m a better digger today than I was yesterday, because I’ve just put the time in and I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed moving dirt from one place to another and discovering something new about myself. I will write something and go, “Huh.” How many of you have written something and then sat back later and reread it and gone, “I didn’t even know I knew that.” It just, I re-read my first book years ago on the way, I was heading off to do a trip. I thought, “You know, I’m going to take the book and re-read it.” Because I was making photographs for… so I was re-reading the script for this book, the manuscript. I was re-reading it and it was like, I was having these revelations. I was actually taking notes. I’m like, “Oh that’s really good.” I’m like, “Whoa, what are you taking notes? You were the guy that wrote that.”

David duChemin:

I think that when we make things, if we’re doing it with rigor, when we are engaging the process, we are unearthing things back there that we didn’t even know were there. I find that a source of hope, that there’s hidden stuff in there that I didn’t even know. It’s like when you open the fridge and you look in there for 10 seconds and you’re like, “Oh there’s nothing to eat.” Well yes there is. There’s just nothing convenient or easy in there, but if you take out that stuff, you’ve probably got enough to make something pretty interesting. I’ve learned that the initial disappointment of opening my mental fridge as it were and kind of going, “Oh there’s nothing in there.”

David duChemin:

If I take the time and apply some rigor, the real interesting stuff for me is getting to the end of going, “Wow, that was kind of cool. I had no idea those ingredients went together.” Because the expectation isn’t there anymore. The expectation that today, I have to make this really big, great thing. I feel it. I mean, I’m in the middle of writing a podcast episode that I’ve taken way too long on and I’ve scrapped twice and I’m scratching my head. But I remind myself every day, today’s task was not to write something amazing. Today’s task was just to write, to start ugly and see where it goes. Tomorrow you’ll pick up the thread.

David duChemin:

When I do look back, with some kind of objectivity, I realize, “You know what? I haven’t failed yet.” I mean true, actual, honest to god the art police are going to come to my door and drag me off because they’ve all discovered I’m an imposter. They haven’t shown up yet, even though every day I feel that way. Every day I’m looking over my shoulder going, “Oh god, did I just hear someone knock on the door? Is it the imposter police today?” Of course not. We’re all faking it to some degree. I think that’s okay. There’s this whole idea that, “Oh maybe I’m just faking it.”

David duChemin:

Of course you’re faking it. We’re all faking it because we’re exploring new territory. The rules for the game that we’re creating today haven’t yet been written. The map hasn’t been drawn. We are all faking it. And I think there’s a great amount of freedom in that. I don’t know if I’m… I don’t think I’m actually an optimistic person. I think I’m actually pretty fundamentally pessimistic on some level, but that my optimism such as it is, is a response to that. It’s the faith that gets flexed in the presence of doubt, not just, “Oh he’s just a really always cheerful person.” No actually I’m pretty… I’ve encountered enough trial and obstacle in my life to know that things just can be really, really frigging hard. But that there is… I don’t know if you’ve read the book Flow or flow theory.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I have not.

David duChemin:

But the idea really and I recommend anyone that writes, at some point, dig into… the author’s name is impossible to spell, it’s even harder to pronounce, but it’s Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I believe he’s a Hungarian American sociologist, psychologist kind of guy. He developed this idea of flow theory. He talks about flow as a state of optimal performance happening. It’s not some magical thing. It’s not waiting for the muse to show up. It’s when you focus and when you work at a level of challenge. When you’re challenging yourself. Not like just mailing it in, when you are working basically up to the limits of your abilities, anything less than that and you just get bored. Anything more than that and there’s anxiety.

David duChemin:

If you can stay on that level where you’re working in challenge and you’re focusing on it and you’ve turned your phone off and you’re not checking Facebook, those other self-sabotaging things we do, it’s the challenge. It’s not when it’s easy. When things are getting hard, that’s not the time to go, “Oh, forget it. I’m going to go down to the kitchen and make a bagel.” That’s when you go, “There’s hints that flow might be around the corner.” Because it’s the challenge. It’s when you really get in there. Creativity is like a muscle. It needs something to flex against. It needs the friction and the tension. Rather than looking at the really hard stuff in life, like Nietzsche said, what doesn’t kill us gives us something to blog about. I really believe that’s true. I don’t look at the hard stuff as the sign that this isn’t working, I look at it as the sign that it might. It just might because that challenge is a precondition for flow.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

This is so, so beautiful and so necessary. Now, I’m sorry, it’s just like my brain is kind of still fixated on this give and take sort of balance between… it’s building muscle. It’s painful, but it’s also necessary and it helps us get stronger. Now I’m just blathering on about this amazing analogy.

David duChemin:

That’s okay. that’s what I did for the entire manuscript of Start Ugly.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Oh good.

David duChemin:

Yeah, it’s just from beginning to end, it’s exactly me blathering on about this analogy.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

It’s so good.

David duChemin:

But you know there is and can be such joy in it. If you show up at the gym with the expectation it’s going to be easy and, “Oh god, I’m starting to sweat. Well this can’t be working.” Well no. You’re starting to sweat. This is where you double down and really push through it and find some kind of joy in that challenge, where you’re like, “Okay, this is hard but you know what? I think I’m getting it. I think I just wrote a word that might actually stay in the book.” Like, “Oh that led to this.” I don’t know if it’s our expectation or if we work in a culture that there’s this whole myth of the prodigy and the genius and we see these movies where everything works out in the end. It was, yes there was a challenge in the middle, but let’s face it, it was probably because the guy just was unnaturally talented and we’re not.

David duChemin:

We look at it and go, “Why is it so hard? Why is it so hard for me when it’s so easy for everyone else?” We’re using external metrics. The thing we see of other people and Stephen King and oh my god, look at all the books he’s written. We’re using those external metrics to judge internal things. It’s just, you can’t compare and yet we do. That’s why I think and this is a completely different sermon, but I think social media is profoundly, can be profoundly destructive to individuality and creativity and instead of going, “Well you know what? This is hard. I’m going to take a break and get onto Facebook.” That is the last thing that we should be doing. The last thing that we should be doing is kind of pausing the work, setting the muse aside and going, “You wait here. I’m going to go compare myself against someone else.” It’s just, it is so toxic for us. That’s probably a whole other conversation.

David duChemin:

That’s not to say that social media can’t be a vehicle for connection, et cetera, et cetera, but I worry that the cultural influences on creative people, I think this is why some of our best work is done in solitude and not listening to the other voices while we are creating. You can do it while you’re in the beginning stages and while you’re mulling ideas. We need inputs. We need to hear other voices, but when you are writing, when you are creating in any capacity, I think the last thing we should be doing is listening to other voices, because they’re always going to be louder than… we have such a hard time hearing our own voice. That is the voice we need to be listening to and struggling to hear and figure out exactly what that voice is saying.

David duChemin:

The minute we start listening to other voices, I’m just a big proponent of when you create, you are in a, if you don’t want to use the word sacred, it’s certainly… well I’ll use the word sacred. You’re in this place where you need to fiercely protect yourself and whatever the process that you engage in is, you need to silence other voices, you need to be… I’m struggling for my words here, but you need to kind of build a fence around it and be like, “This is my time to focus, because the minute I don’t focus, flow is gone and I’m going to have to start all over.”

David duChemin:

Why people feel they can write and I hear so many people like, “Oh I was right in the middle of the flow and then I got this email.” I’m like, “What are you doing checking your email?” There’s a great book by a guy named Cal Newport called Deep Work.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Yes.

David duChemin:

Cal’s funny because he’s the most unlikely guy to speak to creative, so called creative people. You see his author picture, he’s got a button down Oxford shirt and khaki chinos. You just kind of look at him going, and he’s a computer science guy. Yet this book, Deep Work and some of his other books are so valuable, because he basically says, “Turn it all off. You need isolation, you need silence.” Yes of course we all work with different rhythms and maybe you need some music in the background or whatever but we do not multitask as well as we think we do, do we? Focus is another one of those preconditions for flow. You can have all the challenge you want but unless you have time and focus, if you get into flow, you’ll be out of it again so quickly.

David duChemin:

It takes us a while to ramp up into flow and it takes us, after we’ve distracted ourselves, it pulls us out of flow and the effort to pull yourself back in. I don’t know. In one comment, I’ve gone from the dangers of social media and comparison to time management to clearly I need to get back on the rails here. I do think things like any kind of distraction can be very self-sabotaging because what we’re looking for when we jump into, out of flow and into the cesspool of Facebook or social media of any kind is either some kind of comparison or something just to distract us from how hard it is. The minute we do that, we’re not in problem solving mode. We’re not saying, “This is challenging. I really need to overcome this particular problem that I’m working on. What could I be?” And then trying and risking. Instead, we’re just like, we start the doom scroll and 20 minutes go by and we go, “Whoa. What happened there?”

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Absolutely. It’s, gosh it’s so interesting. I always, I have this thought about the internet that you know, it hasn’t always been this way. It hasn’t always been this global echo chamber of conformity. Or at least maybe I’m choosing not to see it that way or my experience has not been that way but I can never remember, earlier days of the internet when it was more a place where you could find your people, your subculture. Through those conversations, not necessarily compare yourself, but refine your voice. I think that there’s such a fine line between discovering who you are through, like you said that communication and through conversation versus comparing yourself and saying, “Oh I should be more like that.” Instead of, “Oh I’m discovering who I am.”

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I don’t think that we’re really taught to develop ourselves and to develop our voices. I talk with a lot of new and emerging writers who don’t understand what it means to form their voice. They say, “Oh is that just how I sound when I’m writing?” No, it’s so many different things. I don’t think we know how to formulate that. The internet I think used to… again, this might just be completely of my own experience but my formative years of being in sci-fi forums and other places where they were very, very niche and subcultural versus now where it’s like, “Oh I have to conform with everything.” I think that there’s been a little bit of a shift there so that maybe people who are my age who went out to the internet searching for themselves and finding themselves a little bit are now going out to the internet, looking for validation and conversation and just finding this wall of conformity.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I guess we haven’t learned to look away yet. I don’t even know if that’s the right thing but I really admire your ability to just not even engage at all. I loved reading in Start Ugly, you share a little bit of your writing habit. I don’t know if this is still your habit, but making coffee, going up the stairs, turning off the phone and opening up the writing program. Do you struggle with that or has that habit become so ingrained that you don’t even think about email until sometime in the afternoon?

David duChemin:

No I actually, contrary to… let’s throw the cards on the table. I read these articles about how to be your best self and have your best morning and all this nonsense. The very first thing from every article, as though they’re all clipping and pasting from some divine source is, don’t start the day with email. I’m like, “Okay. If that’s what works for you. But for me, I start my day with email.” I usually wake up, my wife is still asleep and I don’t want to wake her up, but I need some time to kind of get my… clear the dust out and I start with email. I just, now admittedly I’ve taken myself off so many mailing lists. There’s usually like five emails there, most of them are actually for me. I just start and I kind of look at them and I go, “Okay you know what? I can deal with this later. I can forward this on to my manager.” It just clears it.

David duChemin:

But what I found is that if I don’t do that, somewhere in the back of my head when I do get up and have my coffee. I’ll, while I’m waiting for the coffee and stuff, I will check in on the world such as it is. I’m off social now so I don’t do that, but I’ll check my email. What it does is, when I get up to my room and I cross the threshold and I put my coffee down and I open my laptop, I close everything except… I write in Evernote these days, which is not ideal. I used to write in Scrivener, which I really like but somehow I just, I just got out of the habit. What I liked about Evernote was that it synced across my devices which at the time, Scrivener didn’t do.

David duChemin:

I just open Evernote and I make sure everything else is closed. I have do not disturbs set on all my devices. Everything’s off, there’s no ringing, there’s no pinging, the world cannot reach me. If it’s important, they can have me in two hours from now when I emerge. At the same time, I’m also not in the back of my head thinking, “I wonder what’s sitting in my inbox?” Or at least, I mean of course things might come in while I’m writing, but I’ve kind of cleansed my palate, I’ve cleared everything off. I think all of the productivity tips and tricks and hacks that you’re going to find, they apply only as much as they suit your personality and your needs. There are days when I get up and I just do all the stupid things that you need to do as a creative person who’s also engaged in commerce and building an audience and interacting with people.

David duChemin:

There are some days when it’s just, I don’t, the most creative thing I write is an email or a blog post. Actually not even a blog post. The blog posts are dedicated writing time. But yes, when I write, I sit down and I close the world out, because I cannot, the minute I’m in flow and something pulls me out, it just, I know when I’m in flow. You know how you’re just, you can almost see that gold nugget around the corner and then you’re gone. It’s like, you know how we say, “Oh, I don’t have to write that down. It’s so good, I’ll remember it.” It’s always the thing you’re going to forget. Later on you’re going to be like, “Oh my god, I had a glimpse of glory. What was it? Oh my god.” I just, I can’t do that to myself. I shut it all out.

David duChemin:

There’s 24 hours in a day and I can distract myself when being distracted is less of an issue, but while I’m doing my, what Cal Newport calls my deep work, while I’m doing that, I am jealously protective of my time and my focus, because focus is a resource just like time and they need to coincide. They need to coincide. It can’t be just like, “Well today I’ll apply my time but not my focus.” It needs to be dedicated time, dedicated focus. I don’t know anyone that can produce a creative work and get through all of the other nonsense we need to get through on our way to flow. I don’t know anyone that can do that in just the scraps of their day while also checking Facebook. I just, I don’t think it can be done. Our brains, actually, physiologically, our brains just aren’t meant to do that. They don’t work that way.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I know this is true because I have experienced it.

David duChemin:

Don’t we all, right?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Oh my gosh.

David duChemin:

And yet we’re our worst enemy. We often cloak it in, “Oh I’m just going to… ” God I hate the word, I mean I use it all the time but on some level I just hate the word inspiration, because we use it as an excuse or a crutch like, “Oh you know what? I’m just, I’m really stuck right now. I’ll go onto Facebook and see if I can’t find some inspiration. Photographers, all the time. “I’ll go to Instagram and find some inspiration.” No you won’t. You’ll go and you’ll find comparison, you’ll finish your time on Instagram feeling worse about yourself than when you started. If you do find inspiration, it’s like, “Well what are doing getting inspiration… ” Is it, “Oh look at what they’re doing. I’ll do something like that.”

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Right. It’s someone else’s.

David duChemin:

You’re not going to find your voice in the voices of other people. You just are not. That does not mean that those things are totally useless, but they have their place and if they have their place, there is also a place where they do not belong and that is in our actual efforts to create, where we need to sit down with ourselves and the hard work of discovering our own voice in whatever ugly words we end up brain dumping onto the page.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Yeah, discovering our voice, becoming ourselves, becoming the artist that’s sort of inside of us. This is just, okay, speaking of time which you were talking about earlier. I want to be very respectful of your time. Do you have time for one more question? I could listen to you all day.

David duChemin:

I have all the time in the world so you just…

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Oh don’t tell me, that’s very dangerous.

David duChemin:

Okay so, no I only have exactly until we finish this podcast.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Okay. You’re fantastic. I appreciate… I’ve been thinking a lot about authenticity and not just because it’s a buzzword but I’ve been thinking about how we are authentic and how we are honest. I just, I feel like that came through, that comes through in your podcast, A Beautiful Anarchy, which if you are not already listening to that, you completely should because it’s amazing. Also in your book, Start Ugly and presumably in your other works, I just want to say I can feel it coming through. I’ve read, without throwing anyone under the bus, I’ve read a lot of books about creativity and often when people say like, “Oh, this is how I do my work.” Sometimes I find myself thinking, “Really? You do that every day? Are you a real person?” I just want to say, thank you David for being a real person and for presenting yourself just as a human being who goes through the same struggles that everyone else does.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

To that end, I want to ask, what are you struggling with right now in your creative life?

David duChemin:

Wow. Can I say everything?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Yeah.

David duChemin:

Yeah, but only that, just that.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Only everything.

David duChemin:

That one, small thing.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

So small.

David duChemin:

Well there’s just the daily struggle of asking myself whether, am I repeating myself? Am I just camping out? Because I do have this fear that, I don’t know if you’re a Calvin and Hobbes fan.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I am.

David duChemin:

But the cartoonist, Bill Watterson, when he finally retired, much to everyone’s shock and dismay, one of the reasons he later gave is, he felt like he had nothing new to contribute. He was just and this is his expression, he was just mowing the lawn. Going over the same patch, over and over again. I fear becoming, as a photographer, as a writer, whatever my next incarnation as a creative is going to be, I did a 12 year career in comedy before this, so I have no problem just kind of jumping the fence when I feel like I want to explore what’s on the other side. But I worry about being the kind of photographer or writer that ends up camping out and creating a boxed set. It’s like, that’s the apex of your latest creative efforts, is a box set that really is just the same thing with new packaging.

David duChemin:

I worry about that. Not because it’s not commercially viable. Not because it wouldn’t make me some money. But because it wouldn’t make me happy. Happy’s the wrong word. I don’t think the pursuit of happiness is actually terribly valuable. It’s more about the pursuit of meaning for me and the pursuit of that challenge and growing into a more complex person. I worry that if I don’t challenge myself enough, that I will one day look back and see a missed opportunity. Like I said, just kind of camping out.

David duChemin:

My struggle is just not… to try to find not just new ways of saying the same old thing, but personally going into new territory. I think the only way we can do that is with a healthy view towards taking risks and saying, “Okay, this could… ” I used to do a lot of four by fouring in my Jeep. There’s always, people in the Jeep club, it was always like, “You might want to put your seatbelt on. I just want to try something. I’m just going to try something.” It’s like, “Okay, all right.”

David duChemin:

You know, the subtext is parenthetically, “This might not work.” Which is the reason for putting the seatbelt on. I think that’s a healthy perspective, that kind of playful, you know remember when you were a kid? You just played. You just and there was always the sense that, this just might not work. We didn’t always think it through to the end. As boys we would make a ramp out of old plywood and stuff and we’d get our bike and we’d back up half a kilometer and we’d peddle as fast as we could. We really never thought any further than peddling as fast as we could and trying to hit the jump. After that it’s like, “What happens now?” “I don’t know.”

David duChemin:

I think there’s a lot of freedom there. There’s that loss of preciousness. I think, Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure or it’s nothing.” We’re not going to get to the end of life and get an award for returning the rental car without a ding. We don’t get to the end and whatever goes on in the afterlife or not, maybe it’s just a few seconds at the end where our consciousness fades, no one is going to check us in and make sure that we got there safely, without a scratch, without taking risks.

David duChemin:

I had a girlfriend years and years ago that kind of, I was fretting about something. She’s like, “You know we don’t make it out of this alive right?” It sounds like such a morbid thing to say, but it was so liberating just to go, “Yeah. I guess so.”

David duChemin:

There’s this wonderful book for writers and it’s not just for screenwriters but there’s… have you read Story by Robert McKee?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

No, but I’m writing it down right now.

David duChemin:

It’s fantastic. He’s kind of the guy when it comes to writing and thinking about screenplays. He’s an older guy. I don’t know if there are more contemporary voices now. Have you seen the movie Adaptation?

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Yes.

David duChemin:

Okay so he’s the guy that leads the story seminar or he’s played by Brian Cox in that movie. By the way, for those of you who have not seen the movie Adaptation, don’t be thrown off by the fact that Nicholas Cage not only plays one character, but plays two. He actually is really… I’m not a Nick Cage fan, but in this movie, he’s frigging brilliant. You really must see this movie, especially actually because it talks about evolution. It ties into this whole conversation.

David duChemin:

But this guy, Robert McKee, he wrote a book called Story. It’s thick. It’s monstrous. But he cuts to the chase very quickly in this book and says, “If you’re not motivated by all these other things we’re talking about, think about the fact that… ” He kind of gets to this point of talking about, it’s like you’ve got one life to live and you’re on a train track and the train is coming towards you. What do you really want to be writing about, experiencing? We tend to get so into ourselves that we forget that when it comes to risk taking, it’s now or never. There is no such… I call (beep) on safety. There is no such thing, either personally or otherwise. You have one chance to write.

David duChemin:

I saw Robert McKee at one point at a book signing and he, in a copy I’ve now lost, he just wrote write the truth and he signed his name. He was talking about these deeper things, like the things that really, actually matter. Do we have time in our life, however long… this is the problem. We don’t actually know how long we’ve got, but even if I live another 30 years, do I have time to occupy myself with anything less than something that is deeply honest, deeply true? That reveals something about me that yeah, is maybe a little bit scary or maybe it’s a lot scary. All of the cliches, all of the trivialities have been written about elsewhere. They’re what we call content and they’re on social media for everyone. But don’t we want something more? Don’t we want something that has a, contains a piece of us in it? Like a living, breathing, bleeding piece of us in it when we write.

David duChemin:

That is, to me is so much more valuable. The effort to access that and to overcome all the voices that are going, “Dear god, don’t share that with the world.” That to me is the daily struggle. When you ask, “What’s your big struggle?” It is big. But I think it’s the human struggle, to reconcile what we believe about ourselves with what we are learning about ourselves and what life throws our way and we’ve just, we’ve got this one amazing chance as writers to put that in a form that other people can find courage in, that they can find hope in and feel ultimately like they’re not alone.

David duChemin:

They read these things that are hard for us to write down, that are hard for us, not just because we can’t find the right words, but because… as Nick Hornby once said, “The effort is to F the ineffable.” That’s what we do, right? We’re trying to F the ineffable. Trying to put into words something that is not put into wordable. That, to me is struggle enough for, in the hopes that someone else one day will read my words and in that, find a sense of, “I’m not alone and someone else struggles with this.” And find maybe just a little bit more courage to do the same and to pass the gift on and keep the gift moving.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I love that insight as a gift to be paid forward, knowing and understanding and becoming. Oh my gosh. It breaks my heart a little bit to hear that about Bill Watterson. I didn’t know that he had gotten to that point where he felt like his work was repetitious or it just didn’t have anymore to give, because oh boy.

David duChemin:

I don’t know that he felt that it didn’t. I think he felt that he was on a threshold where it would become that thing that he feared. There’s a lot in the story. Don’t feel bad for Bill.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Okay good.

David duChemin:

He’s doing just fine, but he got to the place, like you know I got to a place in my comedy career where one day I was, I loved it. I adored being on stages, in front of crowds. I thought it was just… and making 2000 people laugh together is the most hypnotic, magical… I have no risk of going on drugs ever in my life because I’ve got something far better. But there came a point where I just went, “You know what? I’m done with this.” I remember distinctly. I was sitting on a plane, heading for a gig in Texas and I went, “I just… ” The magic, it was like the thrill is gone.

David duChemin:

That’s okay. The thrill will be in something else. But importantly, I think we need to recognize when we’re standing on that threshold, about to leap into the unknown. We face it every day. We stand on that threshold when we sit down at our laptops or whatever your work process is. It is the temptation to look back and kind of hedge our bets and go, “You know what? I’m good here.” Or, “I don’t know what is about to come out of my brain. I don’t know what’s about to happen. But let’s see where it leads.” That’s risk. That takes courage. All of these articles on HuffPost and stuff about How to be More Creative. None of them address the real issue, which is creativity is an act of vulnerability, of transparency, of courage. Those are the real soft skills of creativity. You can have the best laptop and know all the best words, but unless you are willing to be courageous in your process.

David duChemin:

I think Bill’s choice to leap into the unknown and leave behind something that was working for him and just go, “It’s done.” Because as much as starting is hard, finishing can be really traumatic as well. Getting to the point where you’re like, “Oh god, now what?” You’re staring into the fog and going, “I have no idea.” This thing that I’ve just written, as hard as it was, it was kind of safe because I knew what it was and the further along I got, the more I knew what I thought it was and it was becoming. Now it’s done and we move forward. It’s like, “I thought I’d gone through this all before. Why am I now again having to find the courage to do this? Why am I taking… reevaluating my relationship with risk and fear and all that stuff?” It’s, baby it’s a every day kind of thing. It’s just, you look in the mirror and you take a deep breath and you go, “Let’s see where it goes today.” Not to make a masterpiece. Just to start. Just, it is enough to start.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

And that is where I would like to end. David, this has been such an honor and a privilege for me. Thank you.

David duChemin:

You are so welcome.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Oh my gosh, so much for your words, for writing your books, for taking your photography. I don’t even know if that’s the right word for that. But this has been such a beautiful conversation. My listeners are just, they’re going to be beside themselves. It’s fantastic.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I do want to promote every single thing that you’ve ever done. We talked a little bit about sending people to your podcast, A Beautiful Anarchy, which I will once again, for like the third or fourth time this episode, encourage you to go listen to.

David duChemin:

Thank you.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I also know that you can pick up your own copy of Start Ugly over at startuglybook.com. You can listen to the podcast at abeautifulanarchy.com. David, you also have a bi-weekly email for creatives who want to hone their skill at building and serving their audiences. I would love to hear a little bit about that.

David duChemin:

Yeah, I could talk all day. It’s a whole other subject. What I have found is-

Sarah Rhea Werner:

I’m here for it.

David duChemin:

Creative people, they want to put their work out into the world and there’s this common myth that, “Oh my art will speak for itself.” And it doesn’t.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

No, it does not, no.

David duChemin:

But we can be so uncomfortable with the idea of marketing and self-promotion. I mean, reasonably so. We put our heart and soul into what we make and then to finish it off and put a bow on it with marketing, it’s like, “Oh, it feels like we got to go take a shower afterwards.” Yet I don’t think it needs to be that way. In fact, I know it doesn’t. I’ve spent, as a creative, I’ve never really had a real job. I had a brief stint in Kentucky Fried Chicken that I generally don’t like to talk about.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Are you serious? Oh my gosh.

David duChemin:

I did, very briefly, but we do what we need to, to pay the bills.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

We do, yep.

David duChemin:

Anyway, I’ve spent my entire adult life, the last 30 years plus now, building audiences around me, so I don’t think about markets. I think about audiences. I think about real people. I think of my work as a gift, so I created something called The Audience Academy, which is newly started. I think I’ve just sent out my third or my fourth one. It’s just bi-weekly reminders of ideas and paradigms and action steps that we can take as creatives to put as much of our heart and soul into our efforts. Call it marketing, call it whatever you like. I think about it as building and engaging and serving an audience that wants more of what we make.

David duChemin:

If you can wrap your head around that, then the marketing efforts don’t become so inconsistent, so ad hoc, so half hearted and they become a gift in themselves. They become… imagine if you could send emails to your audience that love what you make, that want more of it and instead of worrying about whether they’re going to unsubscribe or just not read it, you’re getting thank you letters from your audience saying, “That email changed my life.” Or, “That email made me think something new or feel something or introduced me to something that I hadn’t thought of before.” That is all part of our art making. It’s touching real people with what we do. Especially as writers. There’s such an opportunity for us to take those efforts and not feel squeamish about the idea of marketing, but to transform that marketing idea, that used car salesmen picture in our mind and turn it into a person who loves and serves and gives gifts to an audience of people that love what you make and want more of it.

David duChemin:

It’s called The Audience Academy and you can get it at theaudienceacademy.com. There’s a short little e-book there called Encore and the subtitle is something like Three Ways to Stop Marketing and Start Engaging an Audience that Wants More of What you Make. Some horribly long subtitle. But I would love to send these bi-weekly emails out to any of you who want to… not everyone wants to engage the world with their art, but if you want to make a better living and make more impact with what you create because you want to get your work in front of audiences, then that might be one useful way to do it. I’d be very happy to send you The Audience Academy. Theaudienceacademy.com, just go there and tell me where to send it and it’s on its way.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

David, I spent 10 years in marketing and there’s a reason that I am no longer in marketing. I’m self-employed now and every single thing… you couldn’t see me, we’re not doing a video call but while you were talking about audience building and engaging with people and receiving thank you notes from people, just everything you were saying about that version of marketing, my eyes were closed and I was just nodding so hard. I was like, “Yes, preach it.”

David duChemin:

I love it.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

That’s absolutely, absolutely what writers need to be doing. Those of you who listen to this podcast often know that I am a proponent of this type of marketing, so please do go check out theaudienceacademy.com. Sign up. It’s a bi-weekly email. I don’t think you’re going to regret it at all, ever.

David duChemin:

If you do, you can just unsubscribe and I will go into the corner and quietly weep.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

There you go. See? It’s so easy.

David duChemin:

We all win.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

You get to cleanse your emotions. David, you’re wonderful.

David duChemin:

Thank you.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

This is so wonderful.

David duChemin:

That was great, that was great.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

You were wonderful. Oh my gosh.

David duChemin:

Thanks.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

It was great.

David duChemin:

Well let’s do it again.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Yes please. I would love that. Take good care of yourself.

David duChemin:

Okay, you too.

Sarah Rhea Werner:

Once again, there’ll be links to all of David’s things in the show notes for today’s episode, so make sure you click those links. David, you’re just a freaking national treasure, so thank you.

David duChemin:

You’re very kind. Thanks so much Sarah.