Standing up beyond the critique

Sometimes (it's intermittent), American Idol is on in this house; a few weeks ago, while photographing that precarious icicle, I walked by the screen and snapped this photo. It's Simon, obviously, disagreeing with Ellen, while a singer who has just left her heart on the stage awaits some kind of verdict: Is she good? Does she have a future as an artist? Should she defer her dream, or hold on?

Who is the expert? Whose voice matters? To whom do we-who-are-striving listen to? These are age-old questions, and every artist faces them; each of us, no matter how experienced, wonders. Because while, in some ways, artists are defined by the work they've already done, most artists I know hold that the work they're doing now is the work that counts the most.

And yet: Artists are not going to please everyone. Artists don't have that power. Gangbusters action or poetry. Conservative or risky. Over-the-top hysterical or rather straight-up. The occult or contemporary realism. Life issues or gossip. Right now or in the future. Easy reading or a deliberate tangle. You can have some, but I can't think of a single book that contains them all, and because this is so, it is a tricky business to calculate: What counts the most, and will my work be among the counted?

I wouldn't want to live in a world in which every opinion is the same. I wouldn't want to be operating inside a single standard. I doubt that you would, either. So that what I've learned, in my dozen years of publishing books, is that knowing who you are, as an artist, counts for a whole lot, and locating those voices who can help you do better work—who ask questions you respect, who judge a book not by a pre-established coda but by its own ambitions, who care about artistry, if you, too, care about artistry, or who are experts at action, if that's your thing—counts for a whole lot, too.

You can't please the world. You can always get better.