We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dale Bridges a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dale, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Everything I do creatively, I learned outside of the classroom. But that was completely by accident. I didn’t plan any of it.

I was not raised in an artistic family. Kind of the opposite, actually. My father was a small-town fundamentalist preacher, and he didn’t exactly have a positive view of artists. I was the only in my family who attended a secular college. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I majored in history because it was my best subject in high school and got a teaching certification because I didn’t know what else you could do with a history degree. After college, I was a high school teacher for one year and then I quit. I hated high school as a student, and I thought, “Why the hell did I come back here?” I was miserable.

After that, I got jobs in retail and food service. I hated those jobs, too, but they were far less demanding and no one expected you to take them seriously. I fell into a deep depression. I didn’t care about money or a career or any of the bullshit that everyone else was doing. I didn’t want to get married or have a family. I didn’t want to buy a house or own a vehicle. Everything that society told me to care about seemed boring and pointless. I didn’t want any of it.

And then I discovered traveling and writing. I had never been out of the country. Hell, I’d never even been on a plane before. I wanted to see Paris and London and Mexico City. I wanted to taste the world. So I saved up some money, quit my jobs, and backpacked around Europe for four months. It was amazing! Finally, it felt like I was doing something important! I felt alive for the first time in years!

I started writing down my thoughts and experiences, and that felt good, too. I was no longer depressed. I had a purpose.

When I got back to the States, I was depressed again. When you experience cities designed specifically with beauty and art in mind, it crushes your soul to come back to strip malls and billboards. But at least now I knew what real life could be like. I didn’t have to pretend that some bullshit career was going to fulfill me.

I got another pointless job, but this time I started writing whenever I had a free moment. I didn’t know what I was doing and I was very bad for a long time, but that didn’t stop me. I now knew that I would never pursue a real career. I was going to write and travel and create art for the rest of my life. I didn’t expect to make a living at it, I knew that would probably never happen. But spending a lifetime becoming a better writer was infinitely superior to spending a lifetime becoming a better corporate drone. I now had a calling. I had a destiny. I had a purpose.

Looking back, should I have gone to school to study writing? Maybe. That would have definitely been a better use of my time in college. Or maybe I should have just skipped college altogether and started writing on my own at the age of 18. It’s easy to think about that now. All that wasted time.

And maybe I would have had some great writing teachers who would have made me a better writer. Who knows? But I probably would have become a different kind of writer if I learned it in a classroom. I’m not sure it’s all that important. I found writing and painting; that’s the important part.

What skills do I think are the most essential? Is stubbornness a skill? It’s certainly something you can develop. I was born with it. It runs in my family Anyone can have talent. I’ve known so many writers who were more talented than me, but most of them gave up. They couldn’t handle the poverty and misery of writing. Poverty wasn’t a problem for me, and I was already miserable, so that wasn’t much either. The thing about writing is that you just have to keep doing it. Over and over again. There’s no formula to it. There’s no code to crack. It’s about finding out who you are and channeling that onto the page so when you sit down to write, you tell your truth. Every time. It ain’t always pretty, but when you find it, your whole body vibrates with focus and determination and joy…and you will chase that feeling over and over again for the rest of your life.

Dale, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I don’t have clients and I don’t have a brand. I work for myself. Literally. I write what I want to read and I paint what I want to see. Sometimes people like that, and they pay me money. If not, I just keep doing it anyhow.

I do not understand the current trend to brand oneself. Branding is something you do to a product or a cow. Branding is the stripping away of everything flawed and real and personal in order to deliver something that has the widest possible mass appeal. Branding is anti-art, anti-creative, anti-truth.

I work full time in order to pay all these stupid bills, and when I’m not at work, I make art. I paint and write all the time. I’m constantly working in my free time because that’s what feeds my soul. I don’t know much about the industry or the business or anything else that has to do with making money from my art. That’s not my job. I understand that everyone these days has to be their own marketing agent on social media, but I’m not very good at it and it hurts my soul when I try. It sucks the life right out of me. Some people are great at it and more power to them. I wish I was better at it.

But if you’re not good at self-promotion, you don’t have to give up on art. You can be a fulfilled artist without being financially successful. You have to want it badly. You have to work hard and not care if your work is rewarded. But that’s still better than selling your soul to a social media platform in my opinion.

Make good art. Make it for yourself. Put it out into the world. Make more art. That’s all there is to it.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I think the most rewarding aspect of being creative is the process of understanding yourself and taking control of your own narrative.

Humans are storytelling animals. We make sense of the world by telling stories to each other. We all do this, not just writers. Movies and books are not the only forms of storytelling. There’s also music and art and jokes and religion and scrapbooks and quilts and social media and cooking and gardening and video games. The list goes on and on.

For the first twenty years of my life, I felt like someone else was telling my story. The world didn’t make sense, and I couldn’t figure out how I fit into it. I struggled with depression and anxiety. Everyone else seemed to be controlling my narrative: my father, my teachers, religion, employers, politics, etc. I was felt angry and helpless.

Writing calmed the voices in my head. It put all of my experiences and knowledge to use. When I write, I get to organize the world into something that makes sense to me. I get to tell my story in my own voice.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m not sure it’s a lesson, but I stopped paying attention to advice from other writers. I don’t like books on how to be creative. There are thousands of them out there, and in general I think they’re more destructive for the creative process than helpful.

When I was a young writer, I consumed dozens of these books and tried all the directives. One book says you have to outline your novel using note cards, another book says you have to write five hundred words every day. One book says you should never use adverbs, another book says you should write your first draft by hand.

And it’s not that there’s no value to this advice. Some of these suggestions might work for you. Try it out. If it works, keep doing it. But if it doesn’t, ignore it.

I spent far too much time in my early writing career beating myself up because none of these writing books seemed to work for me. I followed their advice, but my stories still sucked.

In the end, there’s no magic formula for writing successful stories. Every writer has to learn what works for them, and after that happens, I think they should shut up about it. Keep writing, that’s the only advice you should give to a young writer. Keep writing and you’ll get better at it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dalebridges.org/ https://dbridgesart.com/
• Instagram: @bridges.writer
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dale.bridges.75