If not, check out our About page at the Consortium website. It’s got a plain-language description of what drives us, what we’re doing, and who we are.

Patrons, Hopefuls, and Fans

That last is the longest section, and by far the most interesting. The Consortium is all about the artists.

I’ve got access to some incredibly creative people — and if you’re one of them, chances are good I’ve already got plans for you. I haven’t necessarily brought it up with you, but you’d be pretty safe assuming I want to put you to work, whether you’re listed on the About page yet or not.

Honestly, I’m having some trouble finding the time to organize the resources I’ve got. But that doesn’t mean I’m turning anyone away. If you are anxious to get started now — if you’re willing and able to do a lot of hard work for an insanely driven boss who has no real hope of paying you any time in the near future…well, let me know. But consider yourself warned.

Obviously I need more than artists, too. I’m kinda overflowing with unbelievably talented people, but at the same time I’ve got a big deficit of something incredibly boring:

Money.

If you want to contribute financially, I guarantee I can find the time to organize that particular resource. We’ve got webhosts and accountants to pay (and some of those are considerably more expensive than others). There’s a remarkable amount of expensive red tape to get through to start a non-profit. You’d be amazed.

Even if you can’t contribute, though, you can help. We need fans to believe in us, to cheer us on, and to get the message out.

So go check out the site (if you haven’t already). Subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for our newsletter, so we can keep you posted on exciting developments. Leave comments on our blog posts so we’ll know we’ve got a real audience out there.

And, if we ever meet face-to-face, have a little patience if the Consortium comes up in conversation. We do tend to get a little carried away….

When it comes right down to it, that’s what we need most from you, too. Talk about us. Talk about our mission and message if you want, or just talk about our artists and our projects. Whatever you do, though, talk about us.

If you want to see the Consortium become a reality, spread the word. We’ll love you for it.

Your Apprenticeship Papers (Creative Writing Exercise)

If you want to participate as an artist, though, I’m happy to have you. Send me an email (or say so in the comments). Tell me who you are as an artist, and what you’ve got to bring to the Consortium.

Does that sound a little demanding? I guess it could. The Consortium is going to be demanding, though. It’s all about driving artists to become better artists.
And one of the things you actually must learn, somewhere along your path, is to give yourself credit for the mastery you have achieved. Until you do, it’s really difficult to find the time you need to spend to keep getting better. As soon as you accept that you’re on a mastery path, though — patron or no — you’ll make the time to keep moving forward.

So start practicing now. Whether or not you want to volunteer for some unpaid work, you’ll benefit from having your apprenticeship papers in order. And share them in the comments! We’ve probably got no idea just how talented you are, and that’s something we need to know.

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

Our Business

The Consortium is founded on the systems of patronage and master craftsmanship that drove the artistic excellence of the high Renaissance. With an intensive focus on interdisciplinary study and collaborative work, Consortium artists both learn from and contribute to each other’s skills.

In service of their salaries, Consortium artists commit 40 hours per week to pursuit of their craft. Weekly progress reports in the form of publicly-accessible blogs not only provide accountability, they also provide a valuable educational service to the public – a glimpse into the day-to-day processes of professional artists.

While the bulk of our employees’ time is entirely self-directed, Consortium artists commit 20-40% of their time (1-2 days a week) to Consortium projects. That might mean an apprentice in the Writing school spending two days a week on proofreading and line-editing services, or a journeyman in the Photography school shooting illustrations for an album cover.

Because of the diversity of artistic talent available within the Consortium, we are excellently-positioned to take advantage of the changing marketplace for new media created by the proliferation of digital distribution. The Consortium will begin publishing professional-quality e-Books for the Kindle and iBookstore within 2010, and will grow to become a new media music label, video producer, and all-around art-house as we expand into new schools of art.

Our People

Founded by Aaron Pogue, a storyteller with extensive experience in creative and professional writing, the Consortium opened its doors in mid-2010 with a handful of dedicated artists working tirelessly as volunteers in support of the company’s mission. These founding members included writers, photographers, painters, graphic designers, and top-notch programmers.

The Consortium also has the support of a phenomenal board of directors, including an esteemed university professor, a successful entrepreneur, and an MBA working in corporate governance. With resources like these, the Consortium is prepared to face the real-world challenges of building and growing a project on this grand scale.

Our Funding

To acquire the services of the very best artists, the Consortium is committed to offering salaries competitive with “real jobs” – the bane of the artistic community. In order to insulate these salaries from the fickle financial straits common to many non-profits, and to protect Consortium artwork from the soulless commercialism endemic to contemporary American craft, the Consortium is funded through an endowment. 100% of the endowment’s annual yield goes to provide salaries, job benefits, and resources for Consortium artists.

Because of our funding system, the salaries and positions available to our artists are stable and reliable, and any artwork they produce is already fully funded at the time of publication – there’s no extra pressure for a given work to “earn out.” In fact, because of this, the Consortium releases every original work produced by our artists into the public domain, irrevocably and without restriction.

We rely for our funding primarily on a combination of charitable contributions to the endowment and arts grants that fund individual creative projects. The Consortium also anticipates modest income from digital sales of Consortium publications. (All proceeds from the sale of any Consortium public work return directly to the endowment.)

To whatever extent necessary, the Consortium may seek additional revenue by providing master-quality freelance services appropriate to the skills and crafts of our artists, ranging from sales of stock photography and freelance editing to book shepherding and professional web design. The dedication and training of our artists will allow us to provide superior services in less time.

Our Goals

We’re working aggressively to establish strong foundations and begin getting the message out. Our immediate goals are to acquire 501(c)(3) exemption status with the IRS, and to fund the publication of two or three novels before the end of 2010. Beyond that, we’re anxious to begin hiring artists full-time, and expanding our available schools of focus.

If you’d like to learn more about the Consortium, the artists donating their time and skills to make it a reality, or the products and services we currently offer, please visit our website at www.ConsortiumOKC.com.

My next effort, though, is preserved in all its emo glory. The Poet Alexander is basically the 180,000-word story of my adolescence, chronicling my experience getting a first job, falling in love (and dealing with all the drama of high school romance), and navigating the treacherous social undercurrents of a tight-knit church youth group.

In other words, it’s probably not something you want to read. But I wrote it under the guise of a fantasy novel, so I spent considerable time developing the setting, figuring out the tangled political dynamics of the town, and creating interesting fantasy parallels for the tedious real-world obstacles I dealt with throughout those tumultuous years.

To that end, I invented a high school for him — the Academy of the Arts at Three Cities. I dreamed up a career path for him, too. In the end, though, it was all about a young man with a love of words trying to pay his bills with his writing

He traveled to a new town, made some new friends, acquired a job that provided room and board for minimal writing-related work, and spent all his time hanging out at the local art school. I spent most of three years writing that book, and looking back on it now, the plot is easily the book’s least interesting element.

The setting is good, the characters are…passable. The male characters, anyway. But the most interesting part of the story by far is the premise.

I only discovered that when I sat down to write up a plot synopsis for this blog post, too. I never realized before how perfectly that story described (when I was just fifteen) exactly what I wanted to do with my life — something I wouldn’t discover for myself until I was several months into my thirties.

The Consortium

I’ve been talking all month about writing as a profession, and I promised way back at the start that I’d offer an alternative to copyright. That alternative is, in a way, patronage. In another way, it’s the Academy of the Arts. In another way, it’s something new altogether.

Whatever it is…I’m working on it.

If you read the series I used to start this week, you know I’ve been doing some research on business plans. That’s not a coincidence. Come back tomorrow and I’ll show you the Executive Summary from my business plan for the Consortium. Really, truly. The time is now.

I’ll mention some of them later.  But Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein — Book One: Prodigal Son gets my spotlight for now, since this tale of mystery, science, and insanity is what made me want to start building this blog post in the first place.

To Sit — Perchance To Read…

If you’re a writer (and I assume you are, since you’re reading…a blog…about writing), you’ve more than likely heard this question: “Where do you get your ideas?”  As many writers as there are in the world, that’s as many answers as there are to this question, and more. 

I’ve talked to you before about one of my sources for inspiration.  And, my dear inklings, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that another of my idea-triggers is reading the writings of others.

Reading is a wonderful thing, and I believe that most literate people take it for granted.  We glance at something; we know what it says.  We don’t even have to think about it, unless it’s a word like “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,” which the Oxford English Dictionary lists as the longest word in the English language.

Reading unlocks entire universes for our casual perusal or our in-depth examination.  Reading gives us the keys to doors marked Language and Culture — not to mention Power.  Reading lets us see into the minds and hearts of our fellows.  Reading feeds our souls.

And it does a lot more than that for us, but I don’t intend for this article to degenerate into propaganda for the lengthening of summer reading lists.  The point is that reading lets us intake the ideas of other human beings, and these ideas trigger new ideas in our own minds.  In this way, inspiration is self-perpetuating, passing from one human to the next.

Inspiration is a benign virus that invades imagination’s cells.  But instead of copying itself and replacing host DNA with its own, inspiration inserts an entirely new DNA called magic — thereby changing the host in wondrous ways and enabling the host to think up the most amazing concoctions of worlds and characters and landscapes.

This is how the ceilings of Sistine Chapels get painted.  This is how paradises get lost and regained.  This is how revolutions begin.  No wonder despots of history have tried to abolish books.  (Fahrenheit 451, anyone?)

Hosts, Monsters, and Lunatics

The inspiration virus is most contagious when one good author reads another; that’s when the bug bites hard.  When the carrier is Mary Shelley and the readers are Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson, the virus metamorphoses (’cause it does that, y’know) into a series entitled Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein.

Koontz, Anderson (of present-day Dune fame), and Frankenstein.  Just those names together are enough to make this reader go, “Oh yeah.”

Basically, and without spoilering the whole series for you, I summarize the premise thusly:  The Frankenstein legend is true.  Mary Shelley wrote about it, but she got a few things wrong.  Crazy Dr. Frankenstein is very much alive and well in modern-day New Orleans.  He’s at it again — or still at it, rather — creating man in his own image.  Sadly, crazy can be catching (kinda like inspiration, but more nefarious-like), so the good doctor’s creations all have a screw or ten loose.  Add a couple of serial killers and some homicide cops into the mix, and you’ve got yourself a story that Courtney puts into the UPDA category, yessireebob.

You can tell I’m loving this series, right?

Get Your Hands Dirty

Koontz and Anderson got themselves inspired — by an old tale that has been redone and rewritten and remade ad infinitum.  And guess what?  They’re not the only modern authors who are digging around in the root system, looking for long-buried treasure.  Seth Grahame-Smith has done it with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (the former of which I guffawed my way through, latter of which I greatly anticipate guffawing my way through ).

Steve Hockensmith has drawn upon both Austen and Grahame-Smith, penning Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls.  There’s a Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.  Huck Finn is…immortalized? dead-ized? in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim. And heavens to Betsy, there’s even an Android Karenina.  It would seem that no classic is safe from the twists of modern, humorous, and fantastical mashup.

And that, gentle readers, is exactly as it should be.  Inspiration does not belong to some elite, untouchable realm.  The joys of public domain belong to everyone.  Come one, come all!  Read the writings of our predecessors — and be a Frankenstein.  Re-write those stories in your own image.  Be lunatic about it.  Or, if re-writing classics isn’t to your creative tastes, let them plant other seeds in the oh-so-fertile soil of your imagination.  Something will grow.  You just gotta let it do its thing.  Y’know — germinate and whatnot.

Back to the other metaphor:  Let that inspiration virus spread, let the fever grip you…and when it finally breaks, you’ll have crafted something you thought would never exist.  I’m willing to bet on it.

Bring on the lightning.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

(Click a link.  Lightning won’t strike your computer, I promise.  All you gotta do is buy something, and I’ll get a few pennies with which to pay Igor’s wages.)

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

Today I’m supposed to tell you how to actually write one. The good news is that the template is pretty straightforward — a single standard font throughout, minimal document metadata, and nothing much more complicated than a Table of Contents in terms of page elements. And pretty much everything you need to say is prescribed, in standard, required sections.

The bad news is that, even with all that organization done for you, filling in the blanks is a lot of work. Then again, everything about starting a business is a lot of work, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

And when it comes down to it, document templates aren’t really supposed to make writing projects easy, they’re supposed to make the setup easy. As I said yesterday, when I went searching for a good business plan template, it made my setup remarkably simple.

Filling in the Blanks

These are the sections an investor expects to find in a standard business plan:

• Executive Summary
• Market Analysis
• Company Description
• Organization and Management
• Marketing and Sales Management
• Service or Product Line
• Funding Request
• Financials
• Appendix

Each section serves a specific purpose. And while the content changes from project to project, nearly every business benefits by presenting its information in this style.

The Market Analysis describes the market your business hopes to compete in. It should address the competition in the field, customers’ expectations for the delivery and service of similar products, and any notable regulations that would dictate how companies do business in this market.

The Company Description explains in high-level terms what you do. Building on the foundation provided by the Market Analysis, the Company Description  should clearly establish a market need that your company is capable of satisfying. Explain what makes your company a viable alternative (whether it’s better service, better products, better prices, or just better marketing).

Organization and Management tells the reader who you’ve got working for you, what makes them great resources, and how you plan to put them to use. This includes an analysis of your board of directors and your management structure (or founding members), as well as a description of your company’s legal status. This section is one of the most critical in establishing your company as a legitimate enterprise with the resources to achieve its goals.

Marketing and Sales Management investigates just how you’re going to find customers within that Market you analyzed earlier. This includes your plan for getting your message out, as well as how you’re going to position your business competitively and how you’re going to getting your products or services to the customers once a sales is made.

Service or Product Line seems a little late to the discussion, but this section presents what it is you actually have to sell. This should be your real sales pitch, too. You’re not just focusing on what you have to sell — you’re convincing the reader that real people are interested in buying your product.

The Funding Request makes a case for a specific amount of funding you’ll need to start your business. It should include what you’ll need for the next year, what you’ll need over the next five years, and a description of what you would do with that funding if you had it. It’s absolutely crucial here that you go back to your audience analysis and write this section with a strong focus on how it will read to the potential investor (and thinking hard about what they’re looking for in it).

Then your Financials section backs up the Funding Request with hard numbers, showing an analysis of the historical financial data related to your market and prospective financial data (describing how things will look in the future if you get some or all of your requested funding). This section is often composed almost entirely of charts and graphs — and you’re on your own, for those.

And last (as it should be), there’s an Appendix, which contains extra information you’ll provide on an as-needed basis — things like resumes of your key board members and managers, a credit report, and legal documents like licenses related to your ability to conduct business. You won’t share that with nearly as many people as the main body of your business plan, but it’s handy to have it ready.

When all that’s done, you get to write the very first item in the list: the Executive Summary. That’s a one- or two-page narrative that provides an overview of information included in all the other sections. It’s your opportunity, in just a few hundred words, to describe your business.

Describe Your Business (TW Exercise)

If you’ve made it this far into the business plan series, you’ve got to have something big you want to put on paper. Maybe you don’t realize it consciously, but I’m certain that if you’re here now, you’ve got a project that deserves a detailed business plan.

A business plan can do more than secure funding — it can help you formalize a vague idea (or daydream), and decide for yourself if it’s something you want to pursue, or something you’d prefer to forget about altogether. And if you’re not interested enough to even fill out a business plan, you’re probably better off forgetting.

Try it out. Check out the business plan template in your version of Word (if you’ve got access to Word) or use this one I found on Google Docs. Then start at the top, and do your best to fill it out, whether it’s a description of your ad-supported blog or your dream of opening an haute-cuisine restaurant on that abandoned lot you pass on your way to work.

Or if you’re part of my Thursday crowd, maybe your dream is to be a professional novelist. More and more, that’s an entrepreneurial endeavor all its own. So figure out the Market Analysis for your genre and your Service or Produce Line, and if you’ve got the patience, even put your Financials into words.

And then if you’re really brave, share it with us. At least tell us that you did it, though. I’d love to know how your experience goes.

Finding Firm Foundations

Last week I told you that my first step, any time I’m working with a brand new document type, is to find some good examples to use as models. I talked about asking friends or colleagues, and also about using Google to find them in the wild. I did both.

My friend Bruce studied Business Plans while pursuing his MBA, and he was able to provide me some great examples. Not just that, he taught me how to read them (and which bits really matter). That’s a huge help.

Speaking of the bits that count, I also told you last week that a document template consists of several key elements, and then I provided a big honkin’ list of them all. Once I had my sample documents, the first thing I did was create a new, blank one to work in.

I didn’t refer back to my list because I’ve recreated enough templates in my time that it’s second nature, but I did go through all of those elements as I scanned the samples and designed my own, brand new business plan document. Then, just out of idle curiosity, I opened up Word to check out the templates they already had.

Working in Word 2010, I was surprised to find a phenomenal business plan template already waiting for me. I had one all ready to go in my head, but after a few moments scanning the built-in one, I decided to use it instead.

Always be ready to take advantage of the tools you’ve got available.

Designing Your Content

The whole point of a template, I’ve said, is to save you time formatting so you can focus on the important work of writing. Using Word’s built-in template, it took me all of a minute to get my document built, and everything I’ve done since then has been content design.

So how do you design the content for a business plan? The same way you do the content for any other document: audience analysis and deliberate structure. Luckily, our sample documents help make that process faster, too, since they gives us a glimpse of the audiences their authors expected, and (as I mentioned) provide a consistent set of required headings organized the same way, again and again.

Here’s what I learned, from my review:

• A business plan’s primary audience is potential investors. They’ll use the formally structured information it contains to evaluate the quality of the investment.
• The document’s organization is almost entirely done for you. I looked through a dozen different sample business plans, and 90% of the structure repeats across every one of them. That means you know exactly what to put where, and readers know exactly where to find the answers to the questions that most interest them.
• A business plan is all about answering questions. It’s a sales pitch, but more than that it’s a factual accounting of your ideas and mission. In other words, good technical writing will serve you far better here than creative writing would.
• One of the major benefits of a business plan is helping you, the writer, figure out all the fine details of your business. That’s often a pleasant side-effect of good writing, but a business plan is designed specifically to force you to research the things you’re going to need to know, and think them through in an orderly and critical manner.

How to Write a Business Plan

That’s some handy advice and a pretty good application of last week’s articles, but I haven’t really told you much about what the end product should look like, have I? I should probably do that.

Okay, fine. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you how to write a business plan. There will be plenty of details. I promise.

It’s a good daydream, though, and it attracts amazing people like moths to a flame. Seriously, I’ve watched it happen time and time again. I start talking about what I want to do, and brilliant people — busy people — rush to volunteer their time and expertise to help make it a reality. It’s amazing.

The problem is, it’s still a really new idea to me, so as I get volunteers, I’m having a hard time finding ways to explain to them exactly what we need to be doing now (and, for that matter, exactly what it is I want us doing long-term). That sort of communication is critical, though.

So I made a wave, and invited several of my first volunteers to it, including Carlos and Julie Velez. I started typing up an overview of my long-term vision, and then started getting into the nitty-gritty of how we’d get there from here (“here” being, essentially, nowhere at all). The more I wrote, the more I realized how much I was asking of all these incredibly busy people, knowing I wouldn’t be able to compensate them in any way (probably for years).

So, out of a compulsive honesty, before I made them read my big long description, I wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting into. I contacted them in chat, and said, “I’ve got a detailed description ready for you to read, but basically what I would like to ask of you is ridiculously long hours and a huge investment of energy that won’t guarantee any financial reward.”

Julie responded right away. “That’s a hell of a sales pitch! I’m in.”

Building a Business Plan

I’ve come up with a better sales pitch since then, and refined the big idea to make it considerably more promising. I’ll tell you all about it later this week, but first I’ve got a Tech Writing lecture to give, and since I did such a good job explaining the purpose of document types last week, I feel compelled to give you a concrete example.

So this week I’m going to talk about a very specific (and very valuable) kind of document: the business plan. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll walk you through the research process and show you how I learned how to build a business plan. You’ll probably get some sneak peeks at the weekend’s big reveal, too.

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

That age of high artistry wasn’t an accident. It was the convergence of major social factors, public expectations, a funding method highly foreign to today’s business model, and (perhaps most importantly) a different idea of mastery.

On Craftsmanship and Mastery

Back then, it was standard in all professions to pursue a “master path.” Apprentices studied basics and helped with low-level work, until they were promoted to the rank of Journeyman — at which point they could perform all the major aspects of their craft with little or no oversight. The very best went on to learn the fine points and nuance, to face the biggest challenges and perfect new and superior methods. These paragons of perfect craftsmanship were the Masters.

The end of that path probably matches well with your understanding of master artists like Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. That’s how blacksmiths learned their trade too, though. And barrel-makers, and weavers, and the people who drove oxcarts, and probably dog catchers, for that matter. Today, plumbers and electricians use a nearly identical method both for their training and their accreditation.

Humble Beginnings

And just as in all the other trades, new apprentices in the arts put in lots of tedious hours learning the rules and mechanics of their crafts. They’d often work in the studio of a master, learning not just the basics, but also their teacher’s specific style.

In fact, as apprentices learned to imitate that style, they often ended up creating works in the master’s name — Michelangelo’s apprentices painting scenes that we still know today as authentic Michelangelos, and Caravaggio’s making original Caravaggioes. That should give you a good idea of the rigor of their training, since the master’s reputation was on the line.

It should also give you an idea of the kind of recognition and respect for their unique artistic vision apprentices could look forward to (which is to say, none at all). It worked, though. A system just like that produced Michelangelo and Caravaggio, after all.

Declare Your School (Creative Writing Exercise)

Such apprentices were said to be studying in the Michelangelo school or the Caravaggio school. Those weren’t places, just artistic styles, but even though a young artist was expected to develop his own style during his Journeyman years, it was understood that the style of his first master left an indelible impression.

Courtney talked Wednesday about playing the part of a master — and insisted vociferously that she’s really not — but if she’s good enough at what she does that some of you are ready to study her style, I’d say she’s there. I’m no more “done” than she is, but I’m ready to call myself a master writer. (I know I’ve got a handful of humble apprentices studying in my school.)

For my part, I dabbled in the Huddleston school (he was my high school Creative Writing teacher), and in Zelazny’s, and Dumas’s, but I studied for real in the Gipson school. She taught me how to create the illusion of realistic dialogue, how to work in scenes, how to write with discipline, and how to advance my craft. Always.

What about you? Who’s teaching you your style (even if it’s by teaching you their own)? Who’s looking over your shoulder as you practice in the basics, and who’s leading you to mastery? Declare your school, and do it proudly.

Then get back to work, building up your own name.

Photo credit Julie V. Photography.

You certainly wouldn’t have this month’s creative writing series to think about, anyway. This entire discussion  (and, for that matter, much bigger things) sprang from a passing mention in an article at Ars Technica. The writer was talking about shortcomings in U. S. copyright law and said, “Of course there are alternatives — something like compulsory licenses or a new patronage model — but for now, copyright is the law of the land.”

That casual aside took me right back to that conversation with Kris, and then it got my mind rolling. If I were going to try to build an arrangement that could support me as a writer, knowing everything I know now, how would I go about it? How could we as a society make it happen? What would a new patronage model look like?

Before we can really guess, we’ve got to understand the old patronage model.

Room and Board

As Bryce pointed out in the comments last week, Michelangelo — a superstar artists if ever there was one — often had trouble finding room and board under the patronage system. Bryce sounded like he knew what he was talking about, but I wasn’t terribly familiar with Michelangelo’s story. So I asked Trish about it, since she’s an art history student.

“Oh yeah!” she said. “He almost died several times, and he always had trouble keeping a studio.” In terms of financial stability, that’s…well, it’s not worse than the fate most of today’s aspiring artists can expect to get from their creativity, but it’s not better either.

His situation was special, though. For his own reasons, Michelangelo didn’t want to work for the Catholic church or for the Medicis. I can certainly respect that — copyright certainly didn’t create the concept of the starving artist, going hungry for the sake of his integrity. But for many other artists, including names as famous as Michelangelo’s, steady and reliable patronage allowed them to live in relative comfort, with access to the resources (chief among them time) needed to perfect their craft and produce their great works.

In short, it was much of what I’ve wanted to do with my retirement ever since I was twelve years old. Patrons paid artists to be artists.

Supporting the Artists to Support the Arts

Of course, the notoriously cut-throat and ambitious Medicis weren’t supporting these artists out of a spirit of generosity. They were competing with the Catholic church and other noble families for public sentiment. The common folk expected access to art, and the family that funded a David or a Winged Victory could gain great prestige. A patron who recognized the talent of an aspiring young artist and supported him through the long path to mastery could gain even more.

In every case, though — no matter the purpose — the method of supporting these artists was to provide a stable and reliable livelihood for them while they worked. We make much of those famous artists who died before their art ever found a huge market, but we tend to forget that most of those artists were already well-rewarded for the creation of the art — for the time they spent imagining and studying and practicing, not to mention the time they spent executing the work, revising, polishing, and perfecting it.

In other words, by the time a work was published, it was already fully-funded. That’s a far cry from the way we approach it today, when it’s common for musicians to end up indentured to labels for life because albums don’t earn out. It’s common for any major motion picture to wind up in extensive litigation between the pe0ple who made it, because it didn’t earn enough profit at the box office.

How to Become a Master Artist

A new patronage would change a lot about the business model of art as we know it today. I’ll talk about that more next week, but we’ve still got another lesson to learn from art history, first.

Come back tomorrow to discuss how the Renaissance masters learned their craft, and how you as a writer can become a master artist.

Hi. My name’s Aaron Pogue. I’m a writer.

There’s a worthwhile lecture to be made about the importance of knowing you’re a writer and making sure the people around you know it, too. I’ll save that one for another day, though.

This week I want to talk about becoming a master artist — and the people who help you make it happen. I met a lot of people like that during my time at college, but I have to give special distinction to one among them: my good friend Kris Austin.

From the very start, Kris and I were on the periphery of each other’s social circle, but it took us a while to actually connect. I was really only friends with my classmates in the Honors program (and only friends with them because we were required to socialize), and Kris wasn’t in that group. His fiancee Nicki was, though, and two of his three roommates, so I kept bumping into him.

Things changed when Trish and I got married halfway through our second semester, though. We moved out of the dorms, I gained a…well, a curfew of sorts, and it suddenly got a lot more challenging to keep up the casual relationships with some of my single friends in Honors.

So we started looking for couples friends, and Kris and Nicki were at the top of the list. That’s how, after two semesters of close encounters, I finally got around to making my standard introduction to him. “Hey. I’m Aaron. I’m a writer.”

He was fascinated. He was an I.T. major, not a creative type, but he was really interested in my career choice. He spent an hour and a half asking questions that let me talk about my favorite topic: writing. By the end of that, we were friends.

And, of course, during the course of the discussion the question of money came up — and with it, a lot of the issues we’ve been talking about here for the last few weeks. He asked me what a writing degree paid, and I said, “Well, until I hit it big, about thirty thousand a year.” (I was woefully uninformed about the earnings potential in business writing, but then, at the time I didn’t have any interest in doing business writing.)

He whistled and said, “Wow. I.T. pays way better than that!” Then he thought for a moment and said, “Tell you what. Nicki and I could live really comfortably on sixty thousand a year, so as soon as I’m making ninety thousand, I’ll hire you for the thirty and you can just focus on your writing.”

That left me speechless. He’d never read a word of my stuff — he barely knew me — but he was ready to commit a fortune to support my art.

Patrons, Artists, and the Public Renaissance

Of course, we were kids then. We had no idea how much it really costs to live comfortably, especially with kids of our own to feed and (ugh) multiple mortgages. I couldn’t make my family live on thirty thousand today even if Kris could afford to pay it.

Even so, the offer was an incredible gesture. I realized years ago that I’d never be able to take him up on it, but even since then, just knowing that he was prepared to make the offer back then has been a huge motivation to me. It has kept me writing when I was ready to give up, and it has spurred me to get better when I was ready to be complacent.

That’s the value of sponsorship, of patronage, of someone stepping up and saying, “I’ll pay you to create art. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.” It’s an incredibly valuable exchange, and it’s high time we, as a culture, brought it back.

It won’t be easy, but I’ve got some ideas. Come back tomorrow for a look at the roles of patrons and artists in the public renaissance.

Photo credit Nicki Austin.