Offering #18: Pop Star Academy + the Brutalities of the Writing World

✨how many aura points do you get when your dreams are crushed?

Hey all✨

Is anyone else watching Pop Star Academy on Netflix? (spoilers below!) I slid into this after America’s Sweethearts, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders series.

I love watching artists work at their craft and get inspired seeing a tiny slice of the sweat and hours that go into learning dance moves and honing the body/ mind for performance. I’m also fascinated with the line between art and commerce —-and watching both these docs tackle turning these artists into products is fascinating, disturbing, exciting, ick and wild.

✨I can’t help think about writing when I watch this.

I mean, first of all——writers are athletes in their own way—-most writers I know put in hours of editing, reading, editing again, generating, honing, researching, reading out loud, organizing, laying pages on the floor, rethinking, writing some more. Watching the dancers practice over and over feels like an externalization of what so many of us do in the mind over drafts—-and watching them go, and keep going, inspires me to as well.

And then there’s the line between art and selling. Watching the women get cut because they don’t get enough votes and then try to figure out what to do with their lives and how to DIGEST it all brings up so much. What do you do if your writing, the writing you’ve been working on your whole life, doesn’t sell? How do you keep going?

I was inspired by Lexie, one woman in Pop Star Academy (yeah, I’m calling them women not girls even though they’re young….because in fields like acting/ modeling/ dancing etc everyone is called “girl” forever) who WALKED AWAY FROM IT ALL when she realize the performers were being pitted against each other in a survival show. Getting the job was no longer about hard work and talent——making the cut boiled down to getting the most “votes.” One performer kept getting tons of votes from the public, ranking her high, even though those on the inside knew she kept missing practice sessions——-the people online voted for her because she was “pretty.”

The pursuit of dreams was turning into popularity contest with no grounding in the work. The art was evolving into a competition with brutalities. She was out.

Lexie the Badass

Would I have the bravery to walk away from a writing community I was a part of or a project I’d been invested in if it started to feel toxic? ( I mean, I have….but….. not always right away).

As writers, is our allegiance with the craft or commissions? I mean, it’s NOT BAD to want to make money at your art——I think we should. Writing is work. I am AMBITIOUS….as I know most of you are as well. I’m grateful to have an agent and to have sold work.

But can we also call out the messed up parts of the business? How do we not lose our artist souls in all of this?

I can’t tell you how many posts are sent to my inbox about the business of writing each day, and how depressing it all can be. Like, sorry—-I don’t have the mental bandwidth to keep track of all the ins and outs of publishing when I’m trying to hear my own writing.

And the writing world can feel like a competitive “survival show,” too. Just this week I lost a writing opportunity to a celebrity—-someone with a bigger “platform” than me, even though I was told my own work was “excellent.” But I also keep writing. And I HAVE had those breakthrough moments, pieces in the NYTimes, book deals w/ Penguin and Rodale. But it feels like each step is such a balancing act between my own inner drive as a writer and this outer world that’s business. How do we navigate this, and at what soul-cost?

For me, it comes down to—-I’ve always written, and I can’t stop. It’s how I make sense of the world, how I connect with myself and others. I love language—-the sound and shape of it—-and want to spend time with it. I love reading and being with words. I DO get lost in time when writing, even if no one will see it. Even if I experience a professional setback or get turned off by the “survival show” of it all for a bit, and take a break, I keep coming back to writing because the writing itself matters to me.

It might sound trite, but it’s true.

I think we get to want and embody BOTH: the “art for art’s sake” of it all AND the ambitious, striving nature of interacting with the marketplace. We can work with BOTH wanting the book deal and loving the early mornings or late nights alone with language at a desk.

Is it all about balance? Maybe we get lost if we’re TOO MUCH in one direction or another—-if its ALL ABOUT writing something to sell it (no matter what it is) maybe that’s off balance. If it’s ALL ABOUT writing just for self and getting lost in process, is that off balance?

When I work one-on-one with writers we talk about “aiming”—-I like the writers I work with to aim toward publication. If they are working on an essay, for example, I want us to aim for the outlet it could end up in. This offers direction, propulsion, boundaries to the work. Often the piece then DOES get in—-via this focus. But even if it doesn’t, the piece has moved further along than it would if it wasn’t being aimed, in a way.

But, to paraphrase a concept from the Bhagavad Gita and the yoga path (my other beloved practice!), we have a '‘right to our labor but not the fruits of the labor.” We can only CONTROL what we’re working on——not how it will be received, or not, by the marketplace. We can do what we want to interact differently with the marketplace (I see you, writers working on your platforms) but at the end of the day we only have so much control there. The WORK is yours, and forever will be—-no matter what.

Coming back to Lexie—-the Pop Star Academy girl who walked away from the show and competition after a particularly BRUTAL cut that left the girls pitted against each other in a toxic environment, crying. She left because what was happening in the industry at that moment was AGAINST THE SPIRIT of her own relationship to her work, her art. In that moment, there were sides: and she sided with herself. It was inspiring, brave.

And it didn’t mean she walked away from dance altogether. If you look her up on TikTok, she’s still out there dancing.