Most artists are waiting
It doesn't look like waiting. It looks like getting ready. Another class, another coach, another round of materials, another year of preparing for the thing that starts when somebody finally says go.
And the craft does improve. That's the cruel part. The craft improves and the life stays exactly where it was, and after long enough you're a good artist who hasn't made anything in four years.
The ones who last aren't the most talented people I've worked with. They're the ones who produce. They write on Tuesday because Tuesday is when they write, and they'll make the thing badly rather than not make it, and what they think of their own work doesn't swing much depending on who hired them that month.
Nobody is born like that. It gets built, mostly out of things nobody teaches you.
And I know where you're reading this
You're on a coach's website, thinking about hiring a coach, and I just told you that's what waiting looks like. So let me say the rest of it.
I'm not against classes. I teach. The question isn't whether you're training, it's what the training is standing in for. If you're making something and the work is feeding it, good, keep going. If the training is the thing you do instead of the work, you can run that for ten years and nobody in your life will ever call it. They'll tell you you're dedicated.
So ask yourself one thing. While you've been studying, what got made?
And yes, you could hide in this too. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you can't. What I'll tell you is that I'll see it, and fairly quickly I'll make it hard for you not to see it either.
So what do we work on
What you believe you're allowed to do. Who gets to make things, in your head. What you quietly expect to happen if you try something and it isn't good. I've watched that decide more about what an artist produces than talent ever has, and most of it got put in you early and hasn't been looked at since.
How you avoid. Not discipline. I'm not interested in beating you up about discipline. I want the actual mechanics of what happens to a day that was supposed to have work in it, which are specific to you and usually pretty clever, because avoiding is protecting something.
How you get in, and what you do on the days it won't come. The rituals, the practices, the small stupid things that work. This has to become ordinary. Nobody does an enormous thing daily, and daily is the only thing that adds up.
You. Because you're the instrument, and the instrument keeps changing.
Why that moves the craft when a class doesn't
When you're actually deepening as a person you get better without practicing, because more of you is available and more of you shows up in the work. When you've stopped growing you can take every class in the city and stay where you are.
That's the part I care most about and it's the part everyone skips. Craft sits downstream of the person carrying it. Get the person moving and technique stops being something you apply and turns into something you have.
There's no project attached to this
On purpose.
If a project were the point you'd finish it and go straight back to waiting. What I want walking out of this is somebody who doesn't wait, and that person keeps making things long after we're done, without me or a class or anybody's blessing.
If what you want is one specific thing developed and taken out to the people who can make it, that's the Private Development Partnership. Different work.
How it runs
Eighteen hours, spread across a year.
Every two weeks is the default and we move it when your life moves. You book a job, you go on location, something opens up that needs more than the calendar allows. I count it in hours instead of appointments so we can spend them when they're worth spending.