Art by Kate Hush. Attribution disappeared for a while and that seems like a terrible oversight, given the piece.

There’s an old joke. Perhaps you’ve heard it. A man goes to a doctor for a minor bit of surgery. Just a quick cut, in and out. He gets the bill and sees that he’s been charged $1000 for that minor cut. So he goes back to the doctor and demands to know why. His demand, specifically, is for an itemized bill.

The doctor agrees. He goes back to his office. He emerges with an itemized bill.

$10 for the cut, it says.

$990 for knowing where to make the cut.

Maybe you’ve heard this story in a different context. Maybe the numbers weren’t the same. It doesn’t matter. It gets to the heart of something that we believe about doctors: they are experts. Their expertise is valuable. Anybody can cut a body open, but a doctor goes to school for years to learn how to do it properly.

We accept this argument for many fields besides medicine. Computer programmers and airline pilots are expected to be experts and compensated accordingly. We pay professional athletes millions of dollars to play games we all played as kids.

This is not how we think of art. We, as a society, have decided that artists are not experts but amateurs and deserve to be treated accordingly. Society has decided that art is free because artists are hobbyists.

In Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler’s masterful biography of Robert Irwin, Weschler writes:

Irwin would sit in his closed studio, staring at a monotone, textured canvas of a fairly bright color, such as orange or yellow, with two thin lines of the same color spread horizontally across the field. “I would sit there and look at those two lines. Then I’d remove one of them and move it up an eighth of an inch — I had a way of doing that that I’d worked out…” And to his astonishment, Irwin noticed one afternoon that just raising the line that one-eighth of an inch changed the entire perceptual field!

The artist’s true value is not found in the finished product. It is the process by which the artist comes to understand how the smallest changes in the work produce the greatest results. For a painter it might be realizing that a line needs to move slightly. For a musician it might be realizing that a grace note needs to be added at just the right measure. For a writer it might be realizing that a single word in a paragraph needs to be replaced.

These lessons do not come quickly and they do not come cheaply. They come through work and repetition and, sometimes, staring at the wall for hours on end.

It took me a long time to realize that I could apply the word “artist” to myself. There were other writers I admired, Lawrence Weschler, for one, who were undeniably artists. It’s obvious that I had the ability to consider the written word an art form and particularly skilled writers artists. As for me, though, I was just a guy who wanted to write and occasionally dropped something into the world and hoped someone would notice. Few people did. I slowly gave up on the idea of writing.

The problem for me, specifically, is that I have chosen the most easily accessible medium for my artistic expression. We live in a literate society where everyone can write and everyone does write. Even if all a person is writing is emails and text messages they’re writing all the time. This means that I have to work that much harder to justify my stance that I am a writer and, therefore, I am an artist.

I’ve come to terms with that over the last year. I’ve rewritten a book and started work on two others. I’ve reignited my passion for the written word and finally figured out that the problems I was having getting anywhere with it before weren’t that I wasn’t writing well, but that I wasn’t writing anywhere anyone noticed.

It was in the process of figuring all of this out that I finally decided to accept the idea that I am an artist.

I decided that one of the things I needed to have was a central site with a bunch of writing samples on it. So I went through my archives and dug up some old articles. I found a series that I’d written covering the lead up to the Battle of Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg for the Fourth of July in 2009. I found that the pieces had all aged better than I’d feared (they’re all available here), but that I still needed to edit them. I’d used far too many commas, you see.

There was a stretch when I thought that good writing was all long sentences. I no longer believe that. I thought that the best sentences were the ones that had a bunch of independent clauses. I no longer believe that. This isn’t to say that I won’t write long sentences with many independent clauses. I simply think that they’re better as spice and not the whole dish.

One of my strengths as a writer from the start was that I write like I talk. It gives my writing a natural flow. When I write fiction I tend towards long stretches of dialog and I have heard from many sources that my banter is great. I used to take that to a particular extreme. I’d start a lot of sentences with “yeah” or “so.” I’d pepper “though” and “furthermore” bracketed by commas into sentences. That’s how people talk, after all. Or, at least, that’s how I talked. What I realized was that when we speak we need those little moments to collect our thoughts. They’re the artifacts of a mouth and brain that aren’t always in sync. When I put them into my writing they’re just distracting.

All of these little stories of what I’ve learned as a writer are my version of Robert Irwin realizing that he changed his entire perspective by moving an orange line on an orange field an eighth of an inch away from another orange line. No one but Robert Irwin would even notice. Those orange on orange canvases in his studio weren’t the point. They were the training. That was how he trained his eye. That was how he taught himself the lessons he needed as an artist, that a slight change could make all of the difference.

I published a piece on Medium last week that I originally published about five years ago. It’s a bit of writing that I refer to as “a piece of my heart.” I decided to bring it forward to my writer site at the same time as the Civil War pieces. Then I decided to bring it here. Each movement, each bringing forward, brought with it a new edit. The changes are subtle, as it’s the rare piece that I feel was right from the start. But when I brought it here from my writer site there were a couple of changes I made that I was surprised at because even six months ago I wasn’t brave enough to make those word choices.

I can guarantee you that if you read the version that’s here and then go read the version that’s at my writer site you won’t notice the differences. The difference between the two sites is the written version of Robert Irwin’s eighth of an inch. To me as a writer, as an artist, those tiny changes completely change my perspective on the piece.

You might read that piece and think it’s great. You might read that piece and think it’s pretentious. You might read that piece and think that I’m an idiot for giving it such an important space in my mind. That’s fine. You’re allowed to interact with it however you choose. It’s important to me because it’s a time I can point to where I set out with a specific idea that I knew challenged my capabilities as a writer and I came out with a piece that hit those marks.

Ten years ago I had ideas for writing projects that I tossed aside because I was afraid I wasn’t a good enough writer. Five years ago I had ideas for writing projects that I tossed aside because I was afraid I wasn’t a good enough writer. Last month I had an idea for a writing project that was the most challenging, frightening idea I’ve ever had. I sat down and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and in less than a week I had half a novel. Then I realized that I needed to throw out a bunch of that work because the beginning was amazing and almost exactly what I had in my head. I jumped forward and wrote part of the end just so I had a destination and that was as close to exactly what it had to be that I could leave it for the right time. The middle was all wrong and would sink the whole project.

And then I did something counter-intuitive. I stopped writing. I went to my bookshelf and I pulled out Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues and I started reading it. I did this because I knew that Sherman Alexie could teach me how to tell the story that I knew I wanted to tell.

Then I came here. I spent a couple of weeks writing about politics and history. When the time was right I pulled out “On Time On Trains” and put it here, too, because “On Time On Trains” is a piece of my heart. It is the reason that I am no longer afraid of the big, scary projects. Five years ago I set out to write a complicated piece and I wrote the exact piece that I wanted to write. Every time I look at it I move some bit of it an eighth of an inch over and I see it in a different light but it is always the same project and it is always exactly what I expect it to be.

This is the part where I tell you something true. I offer you my work as a gift. I put my gifts here with an ulterior motive, yes. I am shopping a book. I am working on a book to follow that book. I am working on a delirious, frightening book that has nothing to do with anything but that I think is on its way to being the greatest thing I have ever written. It is much easier for me to sell the idea of my book to a publisher if I can say, “Hey, I already have a bunch of people who like my writing.”

I think this is why we have decided that artists are amateurs and don’t deserve to be paid. We see all of the art that’s been dumped into the world for free and don’t realize what it truly is. If you want to be a doctor you pay a lot of money for medical school and spend hundreds of hours learning and training. If you want to be a professional athlete you spend thousands of hours practicing and proving you’re better at directing a ball into a specific direction than anyone else. This is how people pay their dues in order to get their paychecks.

I am paying my dues right here by writing something that other people will, hopefully, read. I am one of many who is doing that. Because I am one of many it’s easy to devalue my work. I’m just writing and putting it out for free, after all.

What you don’t realize is that every word I put here is the product of thirty years of practice. I didn’t wake up this morning, say, “I think I’ll be a writer now,” and then write this. Every time you see a halfway decent writer you’re seeing someone who decided many years ago that they wanted to be good at writing. Every time you see a painting or drawing that actually looks like something you’re seeing a visual artist that decided many years ago they wanted to be good at creating art. Every time you hear a song you like you’re hearing an artist who decided that they wanted to be good at playing an instrument.

The fact that so much stuff is out here for free isn’t a sign that art isn’t worth anything. It’s a sign that artists are all out here paying our dues. This is medical school. This is a thousand hours in a gym shooting free throws. It’s just that, unlike that basketball player, I’m doing this out in the open and making it public.

I can guarantee you this. For everything that an artist puts out for free there’s something lurking behind that they’re holding back. What you see here is a little taste of what the artist can do. It’s a portfolio or a query letter. It’s a little sample of something they’re not sure about and want feedback on. They’re holding back the best stuff because that’s the doctor’s bill. That’s the signing bonus.

Start thinking of art differently. Start thinking of it as a gift given by an artist who is struggling. Medical school is a struggle that ends with the payoff of those big doctor paychecks. Art is a struggle, too, and it’s scarier than medical school. There’s no guarantee at the end of the artist’s path.

Every piece of art that exists in the world started as an idea. Every idea was turned into something real by an artist. Every time that reality met or exceeded the idea it’s because that artist put blood, sweat, and tears into not only the art but the years of learning and practice that preceded the art

Art isn’t free.

Stop acting like it is.

[Author’s Note: This seems to have gotten quite a bit of attention over the last couple days. Most of it is overwhelmingly positive. A tiny amount is super negative. Some of it just seems to stem from people who want to argue with things I never said and pick nits about word choice. Because internet. Either way, if you’re looking to pick a fight or you’re wondering what concrete support of artists can look like, I wrote a follow-up. Enjoy!]