“You don’t owe me an answer…but you do owe it to the work.”
My mentor, I.S. Jones, told me those words when she helped me workshop one of my nonfiction pieces. The piece was about familial trauma that I had within myself that was my most intensely personal work to date. But despite having felt like I was cutting my veins open with every line, she told me that I was only looking at the explicit parts of the story. Not the implicit. Only the surface was being scratched. My veins were bloody and exposed, yet my bones were still intact.
That was the first time I realized that I could go deeper and that I needed to be honest with myself if I was going to even write about this. I had to honor the words coming from me, the truth within them. It’s what every artist needs to do if they’re going to pursue any subject. Artists can write, paint, sculpt, or craft anything they want. That’s our freedom, but then that begs whether we should. When we take on certain subjects, we have to honor it. Respect it. There are movie auteurs that come out of a movie saying “that was good but was it needed?” Which we can then go to capitalism as the base for anything being made because it wasn’t needed but it made money. But thats when we take concept and understanding of what art should do.
Art should make you feel. Make you think. To accomplish that, we have to have that integrity of creation. A purity to a certain degree. If we’re going to use our artistic prowess and make something to make people feel anything, it has to have that degree of standard, no? All this goes to say that we need to make art that makes us feel something. Only then can you honor the art.
It's why some people also feel AI cheapens their craft. Now, I won’t be on a soapbox and say that all AI is bad or the devil. AI was used in the Spider-Verse movies—not to undo or replace the work done by the amazing artists who worked on the film but just to help and enhance it. I have used AI but never for my writings, which are at the heart of creative matters. I will say it made me lazy when my heart was on low.
A friend asked for a recommendation letter, and I was on low, but I said yes. I was backed up by so many things I couldn’t write. So, after they asked many times, I succumbed to the pressure and used AI to write the recommendation. It was generic. Impersonal. They knew it too. They rightfully called me out in the most loving way because they said they had done it, too. All because they also succumbed to that pressure. Afterward, I gave a true recommendation. One that was real and personal and full of love. That’s all they wanted. I learned by doing this, I didn’t honor myself. I didn’t honor art. I could’ve just been honest and let myself rest and give myself time and space to where I could create purely. But I didn’t.
However, the last thing you must do to honor the art is to honor yourself as well. When I was writing this piece on familial trauma, I hadn’t even touched the concept of therapy. After I finished the piece, I was drained, tired, and crying. All the blood in my body went inside that pen and I was begging for peace. I didn’t write anything major or from the heart for about a month or two. Artists give a lot of themselves into their work. If you aren’t ready for that piece to be made, then your art will always be there. Ready for you when you have the colors and words for it. Art is precious to us, so let us hold ourselves to the same standard we hold ourselves. Take care of ourselves.
You honor your art, by honoring yourself. And that is how we make it up to the work. That is how we pay our artistic debt and uphold artistic integrity.
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