How and why do you make an art

This week we're all het up about this dipshit, who thinks that because making music is hard, everyone will be delighted to use the ecologically disastrous plagiarism machine to do it.

To me, this is an example of something I think about all the time: people think artistic work is special when it is not. Not really.

Art is important, but no more important than engineering. It's impressive, but no more impressive than contract negotiation.

Society has a tendency to both over value art, and under value art. Great artists are put on pedestals, venerated and marvelled at, while people who are just trying to make a living by their craft are scoffed at for asking for fair payment. You should be doing it for the love of creation.

I think this is because people don't understand how artistic work is done, and because they don't understand it, they don't believe it's work at all. I don't think this is true for any other profession.

I don't understand how the electrician we just had in figured out that our night store heaters are just on all the time instead of storing heat over night like they're supposed to, but I don't need to understand that to know that it is work.

In fact, I have had jobs in the past that were really not work at all – I once was a receptionist for an empty building! – and yet I don't think anyone would argue against them being real jobs that I was entitled to be paid for.

Artistic jobs are aspirational, I think, because they are not understood.

When you are an author you come across people, from time to time, who wistfully talk about how they wish they could be an author, and whenever this happens I find myself thinking what part of this job do you actually want?

The only real barrier between wanting to be an author and being an author is writing a book. And no one is stopping you from doing that. But you have to actually do it. So if you're not doing it, like, do you really want to?

Creative jobs are very easy to have a romantic image of, but they're really not romantic. They're not glamorous because glamour is an external effect. Nothing is glamorous when you actually do it, not writing, not being a movie star, not going to the Met Gala.

Once you're on the inside you see the gaffer tape holding everything together, you see the exhaustion, you see the fucking tedium that goes along with these jobs, and you realise that they are just jobs.

Most people are not familiar with the actual process of creative work, so the only part of the job they're aware of is the public part, and the public part is deceptive. As a job, in general, writing books is lonely, it is badly paid, it is stressful and emotional.

I find it incredibly satisfying because I like the actual labour. The process of writing feels good to me. Getting notes and rewriting feels good to me. Taking the vague blob of a concept and painstakingly building it out into eighty thousand words of prose is genuinely something I enjoy to do.

I think a lot of people don't really think about there being a process at all. There being labour.

If you've listened to the podcast Sold A Story (infuriating, extremely good) you've heard of Marie Clay. As a grad student she did a research project in which she made observations of kids reading. She wanted to figure out what the kids that read easily were doing differently from the ones that found it difficult.

What she saw was kids taking in text extremely quickly – too quickly, in her opinion, for them to be reading every word. She believed they were picking up context clues from the pictures and from the first letters of each word and taking meaning from that, instead of the words themselves.

In the years since, others have done similar research using eye-tracking technology and they've found the opposite. Good readers read every single word. They just do it extremely quickly.

I think this misperception happens around writing too. I think people who don't write think that words simply flow from some mystical place in an ineffable process that ordinary people can't possibly understand. I need you to know that that is not the case.

Every word I write is there because I decide to put it there. Consciously. In my brain. Very, very quickly.

Sometimes I sit for a while and recite words to myself before I write them down. Sometimes when I write them down, I change my mind and write different words. Sometimes I start writing with very little plan and make those decisions as I go.

The most I've ever written in one day is, I think, nine thousand words, and every single one of them involved making a decision in my brain, slightly faster than my fingers could type them.

Writing is not simply the act of transcribing something that's appeared in my mind fully formed, as if dropped there by Thalia or Melpomene or Calliope. It is taking a sliver of an idea and deciding what to do with it.

Some of the process is instinctive, sure. There are things going on in the back of my brain that I'm not really aware of, and sometimes they push through to the front. That's all inspiration is, really. Something from your subconscious pushing through to your conscious mind.

And even then, even those things that feel like a gift, only lead to more decisions you need to make. Actively. Decision after decision until a vague concept is a concrete story.

It's not mystical. It's not ineffable. It's just work. It's just labour. It's work that I'm good at and that I enjoy doing and that is why I do it. If you're not good at it, if you don't enjoy doing it, then that's fine! Just don't do it! You don't need AI to be a writer you just don't need to be a writer!

I know a lot of musicians and I know that what is hard about their jobs right now is not that making music is difficult. Making music is difficult, of course, but it's a form of work they enjoy, that is why they are musicians. What's making their jobs hard right now is that no one pays for music any more.

Streaming royalties are garbage, physical copies of albums are a niche interest, touring in Europe has become much more expensive since Brexit, you have to be on social media all the time to find and maintain an audience. All of this makes the job much harder than it should be, and takes crucial time and energy away from the work they actually want to be doing: making music.

If you want to make it easier for artists to create, improve the circumstances in which they are creating. Give them money, is what I'm saying.

Please. Please give us money.