Letter One: “You ask whether your verses are good. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.”
Up until 1930 or so, the creative process was mostly solitary. Storytellers went into the great hibernation or trance that permitted them to spin out a story on the page. In the golden age of Hollywood however, a sea change occurred in the way by which popular art is developed. It became too expensive and too risky for creativity to be dependent only on one perception of what is “good” and “bad.”
And so, popular writing, and art in general, became fundamentally collaborative.
Collaborative art is agony. For a young creator, there is no deeper hell than to have their art audited. But the proof is in the product: q.v. Casablanca, arguably the best movie ever written, with a screenplay that was poked and prodded and argued over by three very competent writers, Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Their tension and disagreement over what constituted “good writing” produced a fuller, more considered work than any of the three could have produced individually. And there are other forms of art that are by definition collaborative — you can scrub the invisible blood alone in your basement, if you like, but unless there’s an audience, you ain’t Lady Macbeth and it ain’t theater.
The hallmark of the modern commercial artist is his ability to accept and incorporate criticism. Were we plumbers or architects, we would never refuse our customer’s request to redo the project. We’d simply nod, apologize, and bill more hours. So it is with commercial artists. Commercial artists have a sufficiently thick skin to take criticism, interpret it, and layer it into their art without whining or throwing things.
Commercial artists can do this because they see themselves as distinct from their work products. The secret mental gymnastic: a critique against the art is not leveled at the artist. It’s against the art, which is distinct from its creator. For the dedicated artist, acting can always be changed; writing can always be rewritten, and no art is ever completed; it is only abandoned.
It is fallacious to believe that an artist can only accomplish art through solitude. Art is consummated only when it is understood, and the muses themselves beg to be whored out.
As a carpenter, electrician, plumber, etc, I speak for many (most of them far more proffesional than I) when I say that while your analogy is perfect, let us not forget that those same artisians, after billing more hours, would very deffinatly throw things. Mostly very big hammers.