The thing about using Rent as an example though (of the writer writing successfully and holding down a job) is that I think he literally worked himself to death to put Rent on.

That was likely his set of choices, but I wonder how the work would have been different if it had taken him a bit longer to put it out and took better care of his health. But maybe his ailment was too difficult to treat.

This is the Sunday in the Park With George argument.

Art isn't easy.

Look, the "collateral damage" of most artistic failure is hitting family up for money, or couch surfing. But if you look down the long list of artists in any medium who didn't hit it big immediately, few of them had a Plan B. (Which is a term subject to wide interpretation.)

DeKooning wasn't doing layouts for magazines while he was working out his style. None of the Abstract Expressionists were.

Certainly you have examples like Toni Morrison working an editorial job and being a single parent, or Gorey doing book covers, or Warhol doing fashion illustration.

But Lou Reed kept himself fed after the Velvet Underground by running a tab at Max's Kansas City for several years and the owner allowed it as a form of patronage.

Matthew Weiner's wife supported him for five years before he got on the Sopranos. He didn't go writing ad copy in the meantime. (But Jane Espenson did create the name for Zima. Both Joseph Heller and William Gaddis worked for advertising and publicity firms, but their bosses let them work on their novels in the mornings)

Michael J. Fox came down to L.A. from Canada as a teenager for a show which was cancelled after less than a full season. He stayed in L.A. and lived in his car and took calls at a fast food place until he got his break.

There are plenty of examples and counter examples on both sides of the argument. Amanda Palmer's argument is well supported historically, even if you disagree with it. It's one way to do it.

But not everybody does. I don't know why anybody's upset to hear iconoclastic advice from Amanda Palmer. The list of artists who've gone homeless to achieve their success includes people like Michael J. Fox, Tom Waits, Kurt Cobain, Harry Partch (composer) and on and on. Faulkner fucked off on his post office job to write masterpieces, and Nathanel West was a hotel manager who let writers stay there for free.

And they're the exceptions who got out. Anyhow, Cobain's couch surfing didn't cause his success. It was par for the course for the where and when of it. Many other couch surfers of the time, some with similar talent levels, didn't break out.

Plan B is a good plan to have.

Anyhow, Cobain's couch surfing didn't cause his success.

Well, but I can't really see him lasting in a mail room either. It was how he did it. Others have done it as well. Having a dayjob career does not guarantee anything except you're doing crap work you don't care about when you could be writing songs or books or painting.

Ultimately there's no correct way. There are only limited resources and how you use them.

I can't really criticize anyone for not having a Plan B, as I don't even have a Plan A at this point. Deciding to just take the leap and hope for the best without planning for the worst might be exactly right for some people. To say that's the only way or even the best way for everyone, though, I can't get behind that.

It's not exactly the same thing, but this discussion reminds me of John Cleese talking about how Fawlty Towers pretty much broke him and if, as it sometimes seemed, creative success and sanity were mutually exclusive options, he' preferred sanity. Paraphrased enormously and probably not remembered accurately, but you get the gist.

And they're the exceptions who got out.

My sense of the history of artistic endeavor is that the people who had the dayjobs and succeeded are the exceptions.

It's not exactly the same thing, but this discussion reminds me of John Cleese talking about how Fawlty Towers pretty much broke him and if, as it sometimes seemed, creative success and sanity were mutually exclusive options, he' preferred sanity.

Ha! And I'll take Fawlty Towers and John Cleese's cracked psyche. Whatever it cost him, he's still around and okay.

Having a dayjob career does not guarantee anything except you're doing crap work you don't care about when you could be writing songs or books or painting.

Why would it have to be work you don't give a crap about?

On the flip side, for every one talented artist who rolled the dice like that and made it big, how many ended up with ruined lives and absolutely nothing of artistic merit to show for the sacrifice?

I DO think that it is possible to have a dayjob and succeed at a creative endeavor, and that buying into the having a plan b robs you of your creativity idea is, at it's heart, a potentially dangerous and glib statement. So I'm going to bow out of this discussion, because I don't think I can continue it and be coherent or polite.