While we’re on the subject of hardball lessons that the aspiring artist needs to learn, let’s go straight to the Big One. What follows is the underlying truth that every writer and artist from Homer to R. Crumb needs to know and deal with:

Nobody wants to read your shit.

My first real grownup job was in advertising. I worked as a copywriter for a big ad agency in New York. The first thing you realize, writing ads and TV commercials is

Nobody wants to read your shit.

By shit, I mean your ads and commercials. Everybody hates them. Sight unseen, the audience despises everything you put before them. Your coupon ad for Preparation H, your trade pitch for Nugenix Man-Boosting Formula. They fast-forward through your commercials. They turn the page of the magazine. They hit the SKIP AD button on your YouTube spot.

This is true not just for ads, but screenplays, novels, comedy sketches, art installations, dances, one-act plays, musical revues, strip acts, standup routines. Nobody, not your dog or your mother, wants to read your grant application or sit through your opera or screen your documentary on the plight of indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon.

It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy. They’ve got stuff to do.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Understanding this admittedly unpleasant truth produces, paradoxically, the single greatest breakthrough any writer or artist can achieve.

Empathy.

(More on this next week … )