The best reason to keep writing, teaching, performing, or making anything is that you love doing it.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Katharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress: Morning Glory (1934), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1968), The Lion in Winter (1969), and On Golden Pond (1982). To this day, no actor has won more Oscars for acting.

She never showed up to accept any of them.

Years later, asked to reflect on prizes and recognition, she gave an answer that has outlasted the awards themselves:

“As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.”

Hepburn worked in a world where there was still some space between making something and finding out what everyone thought of it. A performance ended, the curtain came down, and the work had a little time to belong to the people who made it and those who witnessed it before the reviews arrived.

Today, a writer can publish an essay and, for a few minutes, continue living inside the work itself. She has enough privacy to contemplate the paragraph she rewrote six times and the line she almost cut. Maybe she closes the laptop feeling satisfied, or at least relieved that she finally said what she meant.

Then, her phone begins to light up.

At first, she checks out of simple curiosity. Her screen lights up. A few people have opened the piece, and she wonders who they are. She checks again a little later. The number has climbed, but only slightly. By evening, she has pulled up the last essay to compare the two and is wondering why that one was widely shared while this one seems to be sitting still. The work has barely had time to leave her hands and, if she isn’t careful, other people’s response is already beginning to change the way she looks at it.

One of my college students put it this way: “I’ll post something I actually really like, and then if nobody likes it, I start thinking, wait, was that embarrassing? Like, did I think it was better than it was? But then I’ll post something stupid that took me five seconds, and everybody reacts to it, and then I’m like, okay, this makes no sense, but I guess this is my brand now.”

The Vanishing Gap Between Making and Measuring

The numbers do have a purpose. A writer wants to know whether people are finding her work. An actor wants to know whether anyone is buying tickets. If something connects with an audience, that can lead to another assignment, another role, another chance to keep doing the thing she loves.

The trouble begins when the response to one piece starts following her into the next one.

She remembers which essay brought in the most readers. Maybe an editor mentions that it performed especially well. The next time she sits down to write, that success is still somewhere in the room with her. She has another idea she wants to follow, but she also knows exactly which subject people clicked on last time.

That knowledge can be surprisingly persuasive.

The same thing can happen to an actor who discovers that audiences love her in a certain kind of role. At first, the attention feels wonderful. Then another script arrives, and somewhere in the decision is the memory of what happened the last time she gave people what they already knew they wanted from her.

This is where recognition becomes complicated. We need audiences. Their response tells us when the work has reached someone, and sometimes it gives us the opportunity to make more of it. But the audience arrives at the end of the process. They can respond to the thing we made. They cannot decide for us what we should make next.

Eventually, the attention moves on anyway. The performance closes. An essay disappears beneath newer ones. Whatever praise came with the work belongs to a particular moment.

Then the artist has to sit down again.

What makes you come back to the work when no one is watching?

I have been unusually fortunate as a writer. I have written almost every day since 2013, but writing essays and poetry has never been how I pay my bills. That has been a deliberate choice.

Years ago, I started a website where I wrote much more personally about my life. As it grew, I began connecting with visual artists around the world and pairing their work with mine. Sometimes a painting could say something beside an essay that I could never quite get onto the page. We explored love and anger, depression and hope, all the complicated territory people carry around with them.

Eventually, the audience became much larger than I had expected. Something changed for me when that happened. I would sit down to write and feel the size of the room. People I had never met knew intimate details about my life, and the freedom I had felt when the site was smaller began to disappear. I eventually closed it.

When I started writing publicly again, I made a different choice. My work still contains me, because I am not sure how any writer avoids that, but I no longer feel obligated to hand over my private life every time I sit down at the keyboard.

I had learned something similar years earlier with theatre. I loved it enough to make it my profession, and for a time my ability to pay bills depended on auditions, contracts and other people deciding whether I got to keep doing it. The pressure changed my relationship with something I had loved since I was young. Eventually, I walked away from performing altogether.

It took years before I found my way back to it.

Writing has taught me to protect that love differently. I want readers. I am delighted when an essay travels. I would much rather see a thousand people read something than twelve. But I also want to be able to sit down the next morning and write the piece that interests me, even if I have every reason to suspect that only twelve people are going to read it.

That, for me, is part of keeping the work as the prize.

The Work Before the Applause

The Russian actor and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski gave his students an instruction that helps answer that question:

“Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.”

It is a humbling distinction. Acting asks you to look outward toward the script and the people sharing the stage with you. It also asks you to remember the audience who will eventually sit in the dark and receive the story. Talent matters because it helps you serve all of them well.

Acting carries a peculiar temptation because the artist and the instrument share the same body. A pianist can leave the piano behind when the concert ends, and a painter can step back from the canvas. An actor’s instrument is her own skin, so there’s nowhere to set it down. When the curtain falls, she’s the one who gets applauded, reviewed, and photographed under the lights.

Over time, the pleasure of being seen can begin to crowd out the pleasure of doing the work itself.

Stanislavski’s instruction asks the actor to care about why a scene works and what a character is hiding beneath the words she speaks. Sometimes that means staying with the same moment for the twentieth time because something in it still hasn’t given up its secret. It is slow work, often repetitive and usually unseen, and much of getting better happens long before anyone takes a seat.

The audience shows up later. The work starts long before that.

That idea reaches far beyond the theatre. Readers see the finished essay, while the writer remembers the paragraph that took eleven attempts to get right. An audience watching opening night has no idea how many rehearsals went nowhere before the production came together. A student listening to a clear explanation rarely sees how long the teacher spent trying to find the right way to say it.

Public recognition usually attaches itself to the finished result because that is the part other people can see. Much of the work that created it happens in private.

There is a particular satisfaction in finally getting something right when no one else knows how difficult it was. A sentence settles into place after resisting you for an hour. A scene that felt stiff in rehearsal suddenly begins to breathe. The pleasure comes from knowing that the work became better because you stayed with it.

Serve the Work

A craft asks you to pay attention to what the work itself requires.

For an actor, that means serving the play and the people on stage with her. A writer gives the subject enough attention to discover what the piece actually wants to say. A teacher keeps working until the idea becomes clear enough to hand to someone else.

Ambition can have a place. Praise can feel wonderful, and publication or promotion can open opportunities to keep working. Their job is to support the work rather than determine its worth.

The deeper question is what brings someone back to the desk after the applause has faded.

Sometimes it is curiosity. Sometimes the piece simply has more to give, and you know you have not reached it yet. Often, it is the belief that this particular piece deserves your full attention while it is still in your hands.

Maybe that is why Hepburn’s line still carries so much weight.

She received almost every form of professional recognition an actor could hope for. Four Oscars sat somewhere with her name engraved on them. Yet when she was asked what counted, she talked about the work: the hours spent rehearsing, learning lines, working with other actors, and trying to make each performance better.

“My prize is my work.”

The applause eventually ends.

Then you get to go back to work.