Is It Still Art If You Don't Suffer For It?

The tortured artist is a beautiful lie we tell ourselves about creativity.

You know the story: genius emerges from pain, masterpieces come from madness, and authentic art requires authentic suffering.

Van Gogh's ear. Sylvia Plath's oven.

The romantic notion is that real artists must bleed for their work—literally or metaphorically.

But what if the greatest suffering for art isn't dramatic at all? What if it's just... showing up?

The 9 to 5 of creation

I've written stories, novels, built software, created things that mattered to me and occasionally to others.

Sometimes those projects began with a moment of inspiration. But here's how the projects continued: slowly, ploddingly, sometimes painfully.

Not once did I birth something worthwhile in a continuous fever dream of artistic ecstasy while the leaves of a calendar fluttered away in the background.

Instead, every meaningful thing I've made came about the same way: one unremarkable day at a time, one stubborn sentence at a time, one line of code that refused to work until I made it work.

The myth of the inspired artist is seductive because it makes creativity seem mystical and rare. It suggests that real artists are chosen, touched by something divine, different from the rest of us.

This mythology serves everyone badly. It gives aspiring creators an excuse to wait for lightning to strike. It diminishes the actual work that goes into making anything worthwhile.

How it really works

The truth is more mundane and more democratic. Creativity is a practice, rather than a visitation.

It's showing up when you don't feel like it. It's writing terrible first drafts. It's debugging code at midnight when your eyes burn and your brain feels like mush. It's the small, grinding discipline of continuing when every cell in your body wants to quickly check something on your phone instead.

This isn't to say that inspiration doesn't exist. Of course it exists. But inspiration is just the spark.

The real work is the long burn that follows inspiration. Progress that's fueled not by divine madness but by something far more practical: the decision to keep going. Day after day, brick by brick, building something that didn't exist before.

The actual suffering for art isn't romantic. Wrestling with a problem you can't solve yet isn't pleasant. It's the frustration of knowing what you want to create but not yet having the skill to create it. It's the tedium of revision. It's going through the hundredth iteration. It's the willingness to kill your darlings and start again. It's showing up on Tuesday when Tuesday feels exactly like Monday and nothing seems possible.

It's a kind of suffering, granted. But this kind of suffering doesn't make for good movies or compelling biographies.

There's nothing dramatic about opening your laptop again, about facing the blank page again, about debugging the same function for the fourth time. It's not the stuff of legend. But it's the stuff of actual creation.

Abandoning the myth of suffering

This workaday approach to creativity democratizes it. You don't need to be touched by madness or blessed with genius. You don't need to live in a garret or sacrifice your mental health. You just need to be willing to show up consistently and do work that often feels unremarkable in the moment.

Van Gogh painted something like 2000 artworks in just over a decade. That's not the output of someone waiting for inspiration. That's the output of someone who just showed up nearly every day.

So is it still art if you didn't suffer for it in the romantic sense? If you created it through discipline rather than divine madness? If you built it methodically instead of birthing it in a moment of inspired agony?

Of course it is. The only suffering that truly serves art is the willingness to continue, even (perhaps especially) when continuing is hard. Everything else is just mythology.