Three-Quarters of the Way There: An Interview with Andrew Marshall

Andrew Marshall works as a photographer, painter, videographer, writer, and podcaster, the combination of which make up his entire income.  Much of his work focuses on outdoor exploration: his writing’s been featured in Upventur and Backpacking Light (for whom he also produces a podcast), and he’s photographed landscapes from Scotland  to Yosemite Valley.  I called him via Skype to talk about self-employment, balancing promotion with creativity, and what it’s like to leave your Day Job.

 

I. I’ve Sought Out More Hands-On Work

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: So, going back a ways, why did you choose art school?

Andrew Marshall: I wanted to make movies.  I was a film major at SCAD [Savannah College of Art and Design] and I had wanted to be a filmmaker since I saw Jurassic Park when that came out in 1994.  It took a while, but I think what I eventually realized is that I wanted a job that was exciting, and I wanted a job that would take me around the world and that felt like an adventure, and filmmaking was a way to do that.

BIAHADJ: Was filmmaking a major that took up all of your time, or were you able to work in other areas as well?

AM: I started shooting still photography as a way to practice shooting film in motion.  So in college what they’ll do is they’ll slap a 16-millimeter motion picture camera in your hand and tell you to go make a movie.  And one hundred feet of film is three minutes of film, and that costs—probably now it costs like two hundred bucks, so you don’t want to screw that up.  So I started shooting on an old 35-millimeter fully manual camera, a Canon AE-1 from the ‘80s, just as a way to practice exposing film, and by the time I graduated from college a few years later I was much more interested in photography than I was in making movies.

BIAHADJ: What caused the shift?

AM: It’s not as much teamwork.  The logistics of getting enough people together to make a film, and to do it well, it just…it overwhelms me.  I’m too anxious for it, I think.  Now one of my Day Jobs is doing video production, a lot of times for small nonprofits like schools or churches, and even that I do as a one-man operation.  I’m the camera guy, I’m the sound, I do all the editing.

BIAHADJ: I’ve noticed that too—projects that require teamwork are a lot harder if you don’t have that natural social network, so it’s harder to get people to help you on the weekends.

AM: Right.  So you’d ask around to twenty people and five of them would say yes and two of ‘em would show up.

BIAHADJ: [laughs] That sounds about right.  How did you start doing solo video production?

AM: After college I worked in public television for one of the state affiliates, Georgia Public Broadcasting.  I was on a show called Georgia Outdoors and I started as an intern and by the time I left I was an associate producer.  That was mostly writing and producing, and producing is mostly sending emails and working on budgets and stuff.  That was the start of me thinking that maybe I didn’t want to do this, or at least maybe I didn’t want to do it at this level in the organization.  I was working on an outdoors show and showing up to the office in khakis and a polo and sitting in front of a computer eight hours a day, so that wasn’t really what I was after.

BIAHADJ: So what happened next?

AM: After a year or two in public television it was 2009, which was when the recession, as I’m sure you know, really started to pick up, and in a recession one of the first things people do is stop donating to public television.  So people were quitting left and right and other people were retiring and not getting replaced.  And I kind of looked around and said, You know, I don’t super-love this job anyway, I think it’s time to get out.

I was lucky in that around the same time a position at a church near where I lived came up doing the same stuff, video production and graphic arts, and it seemed like it would be more hands-on, which was what I was looking for—and this is a super-long answer to your question…

BIAHADJ: No no no!  This is all perfect, since I’m interested in how creative people carve out their own unique career tracks.

AM: So I guess the macro-answer to how I started doing all this stuff myself is that in my career I’ve sought out more hands-on work where I only had to involve myself and had to rely on fewer and fewer people.  At the church it was much smaller than public broadcasting and I was doing more by myself, so I was able to learn some new skills that I didn’t have because there was no one to do them.  Then after I left the church I took a sidetrack, I was an educator for four or five years—

BIAHADJ: What kind of educator?

AM: I was a house parent at a boarding school.

BIAHADJ: Ah, what exactly is that?

AM: The kids who lived at the school would get up in the morning and they would go to school, and then it would be 3:30 and they were my and my wife’s responsibility until 7:30 the next morning.  So we raised thirty middle schoolers for four years.

BIAHADJ: How big was the house?

AM: It was big.  Consider it a mansion—think Professor Xavier-type style.  That was a brief sidetrack, and when I was leaving there I started thinking, OK, I’m just going to work for myself.  That was the point where I started to do video production just with me as a hired gun.

BIAHADJ: How did you pick up your first client?

AM: It was really hard.

BIAHADJ: Wow, so you made the decision to go into solo video work before you even had a first client?

AM: Yeah.  Four or five years of being an educator was super rewarding work but it was really draining, and it was the kind of job I think you’re probably familiar with, that takes so much out of you that you don’t have any creative juice left to put toward the things that you love.

BIAHADJ: Yes… [laughs]

AM: It was doing the same thing to my wife—my wife’s a classically trained opera singer and professional actor, and neither of us had the energy to do the things that we loved to do.  So we said, All right, we’re going to quit and move in with my parents for six months while we try to get my business rolling.

BIAHADJ: What was the decision process like leading up to a major life change like that?

AM: We talked about it for a long time.  We were there for four or five years, and it was a natural point to leave since there were some personnel issues and shifts in management, and it was getting to the point where it kind of lit a fire under us.  That kind of situation is not great for a relationship, and my wife and I didn’t even have any energy for each other.  We’d come to the conclusion that we had to get out, and as long as we were getting out, maybe now was the time for me to jump back into this world that I’d left four or five years before.  I did actually look for full-time work in video production, graphic arts, or anything visually related, for a solid year, and really had no luck.

BIAHADJ: Were you looking while you were still at the boarding school?

AM: I was.  And that’s actually ultimately what led to me saying, you know what, I’m just going to work for myself, because I’d been out in the world long enough that I couldn’t prove that I knew what I was doing.  I knew that I could do it, but no one would take a chance on me.

BIAHADJ: That’s such a frustrating feeling—you know you have the skills, you know your work is good, but you try to show it to people and they don’t take you seriously because you don’t have the credentials yet.

AM: One of the things that helped was that at some point while I was working at that school they needed a video, and the videographer they hired ended up dropping out, and I was able to just kind of slide in and take the gig, and that gave me a foothold.  That was how I ended up making videos for schools all over the country.  It’s what everybody knows, but it drives us crazy—it’s so much more about luck and contacts than it is about skill.

BIAHADJ: I’m with you there.

AM: I mean, let’s say the skill is 25% of it.  I think people like to believe that the skill is 90% of it, and I just think that ratio is WAY not what people actually think it is.

BIAHADJ: I agree, and I think we all really want to believe that we get ahead based on our own merit, especially in America where we have this kind of American dream, rags to riches kind of story, but the reality is that the people who start out with more benefits or more contacts, often through their parents, are going to get more opportunities, whereas the people who don’t have those contacts are going to get fewer opportunities.

AM: Absolutely.  Not to sound bitter or anything, but I think that coming to that realization is something that can help a lot of people who are trying to move forward in their creative careers.

 

 

II. I Wish the Things I Enjoyed Doing the Most Were the Most Financially Lucrative

 

BIAHADJ: So let’s rewind a bit—you’re making the big move away from the boarding school, you’re going to start your own business, you’re moving back in with your parents.  How were you financially during this time?

AM: We had some savings, and we had worked really hard to get out of debt, which I think is important for anyone who wants to take some risks.  At the time we made the move, I’d say it was moderately risky, but I had vastly overestimated how quickly I’d actually start being able to pay our bills.  The original plan was for my wife to take six months to a year to figure out what she wanted to do with her life as well, and within three months she ended up having to work at a coffee shop so we could keep our Obamacare.

BIAHADJ: Oh wow.

AM: That was a rough time because I was spending all my time trying to chase down clients, and I’d get a gig here or a gig there.  Scrolling through video production want ads on Craigslist is like filtering out…you know like 98% of it is porn?  I was in a very small market—we were in El Paso Texas, so it wasn’t like I was in LA or anything.  That’s actually how I ended up painting and writing poetry and becoming serious about selling my still photography.  I called it the Spaghetti Approach because I was just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck and what I could make a buck at, and that was writing, painting, photography, videography, and podcast production.  Those are the five things I ended up with that make up my income right now.

BIAHADJ: That seeing what sticks approach is so important, and I hate to see people who narrow their approach by not trying new things or challenging themselves.

AM: At least in my world the stock advice is to find a niche and make yourself the only person who can do that thing, or at least the best person, and I was just never able to make that work.  I don’t necessarily know why.  Maybe so many people like to do the stuff I like to do that that advice doesn’t work.

BIAHADJ: Did you try the spaghetti approach out of necessity, or because you’re naturally interested in so many different things that you found yourself gravitating towards them naturally?

AM: It’s probably more the second one.  At some point after I left the boarding school I wanted to get away from making videos for schools.  At this point that’s my Day Job.  It’s a Day Job that’s better than the Day Jobs I’ve had, and it’s still ultimately something that I’m doing using the skills that I have, but I don’t necessarily love it.  What I wanted to do was be outside in cool, adventurous places with a camera.  I thought that surely someone must need someone who can hike up and down a mountain with fifty pounds of camera gear and get a good shot, and that’s what I can do, that’s my niche.  So I really focused on that for a while, and what I learned was that niche is filled with people who have come to it from the opposite direction.  The outdoor adventure film world is filled with ex-skiers, ex-climbers, and ex-mountain bikers who have learned how to make movies.  They already have the built-in community, so they just strap a Go Pro on to something.  No one’s coming to that world from the traditional filmmaking world.

BIAHADJ: Have there been any advantages at all to you coming at it from that direction?

AM: No.  In fact I’m getting ready to just phase out the whole video production side of my life, because I still can’t crack into doing what I want to do with cameras and computers.  Now, in the writing side of my life I’ve cracked into the outdoor world there.

BIAHADJ: Yes, I saw you’ve had a lot of publications in outdoor magazines.  I really liked the longer one you did, Wandering in a Thirsty Country, which you clearly did a lot of research on.  I thought it struck a nice balance between good nature writing, insightful political commentary, and a specific look at a small town’s relationship with the monument.

AM: Thank you.  I had never written anything like that before, ever.  I had had a couple of poems published and I’d written a few essays that I’d been shopping around literary magazines and nothing had been picked up yet.  I think I made…seventy-five dollars for that article, and it took me three weeks to write. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: If you calculate your hourly rate as a writer just starting out you’ll be a very sad individual, I think…

AM: Yeah.  But that article was my gateway into doing between fifteen and twenty hours a week for Backpacking Light writing and editing, and that article was what got me that gig.  It’s not precisely what I want to be doing—it’s mostly technical writing, gear reviews and stuff, but I’m able to still get my hands into the stories and essays and opinion pieces, which are what I really like writing.

BIAHADJ: I imagine the gear reviews are a good moneymaker for the website, so I’m sure you get more than seventy-five dollars for them after three weeks of work.  Does 100% of your income come from freelance work?

AM: In a sense.  I would say 100% of my income comes from contract work and freelance.

BIAHADJ: I mean, as opposed to having to pick up another coffee shop job on the side or something

AM: Yes, it’s writing and editing and podcasting production for Backpacking Light, video production and editing for whoever will hire me to do that, and I have a couple of longrunning gigs there, and then it’s selling fine art, photography, and paintings.  Then it’s poetry, which I think to date I’ve made ten dollars on.  That’s in order from greatest to least amount of income.

BIAHADJ: It’s impressive that you’re able to balance the more lucrative but less interesting work with the things that you’re more passionate about but that maybe don’t pay as well.

AM: It’s awesome because I can work until 2:00, and if I’m ahead of schedule I can go mountain biking or skiing or whatever I want to do then call it a day and go back and work in the evening or whatever.  And that’s the good side of it.  The bad side of not sitting in a cubicle is that it becomes hard—er, I guess it depends on the office job, but there’s a certain type of job that you can just leave, and your boss probably isn’t going to call you at 8:00 at night when you’re at home and you’re trying to work on something else, right?  One of the things I’ve been struggling with in the last six months is that some of these gigs I have are essentially only a ten-hour a week job, but sometimes it’s more like a thirty-hour a week job.  It’s on me to keep that from happening, but it can be difficult because that’s what’s paying the bills, so the attraction is to say well, I don’t have time to write or paint today because I’ve got to get this project done for these people.

BIAHADJ: Yes, that lure can be strong…

AM: I don’t have a solution for that yet, other than being aware that it can actually happen, and then doing an analysis every now and then of how exactly I’m spending my week, and whether this is the way I want to be spending it.  I feel like I’m three-quarters of the way to living the life that I want to live, but I feel like I’ve been three-quarters of the way there for a while and I’m having trouble getting across the finish line.

BIAHADJ: What is the one-quarter that’s missing?  Is it something you can put your finger on?

AM: Yeah, I think it’s [laughs] I wish that the things I enjoyed doing the most were the most financially lucrative, but it’s an inverse relationship.  When I say I’m three-quarters of the way there, the things I’m doing are engaging my creative muscles and requiring skill and concentration.  All of that is exactly what I’m looking for, but it’s just not quite there yet.

 

 

III. The Most Economical Way to Use My Resources

 

BIAHADJ: After you’d left the school and were living with your parents, how rough was it for those first few months until you started making bill-paying money?

AM: It was very disheartening.  One, you just can’t sit in front of a computer looking for jobs for forty hours a week, it’s just not productive.  So after I’d been looking for clients for five hours, another two hours was not going to make a difference, so I might as well go out to the desert and go on a hike.  But then when I’d be out there I would feel bad that I wasn’t actively looking for work.  Partly that’s my personality, and partly I think that’s something that anyone who’s ever been out of work has gone through.  And then I told you my wife had to go get a job, and that wasn’t originally part of the plan, so I felt doubly bad because she’s got a master’s degree and she’s down there making coffee for people.

BIAHADJ: Did the income from the coffee shop cover all of your expenses?

AM: We had a certain amount of bills.  We had our cell phone bill and car insurance, and…you know, basically everything except for rent.  We didn’t have a car payment, so that was good.  But what actually broke us through was when I decided to print out some of my photos and take them to an artist market that was popping up every Sunday in a strip mall, and that ended up being my biggest moneymaker while we lived in Texas.

BIAHADJ: What was the El Paso strip mall art scene like?

AM: It was an artist and famers market, and it was West Texas, so about fifty percent of the people were there selling chili and salsa.  And then there was pottery and woodcuts and textile stuff like bookmarks—basically if you can make it by hand they’ll sell it there.  So I started out selling prints, but I realized pretty quickly that what people wanted was prints of stuff from El Paso, and not prints of my random farm shots from Ohio.  So that’s when I started painting, because I was like, Well, I can probably paint some cacti and sell those, so then I basically painted cacti for the next year and made a couple hundred dollars a week.

BIAHADJ: Were you just selling them at the booth, or were you doing commissions at that point?

AM: I started out selling them at the booth and then it turned into commissions.  And then I started doing pet portraits too because someone said Hey, can you paint my dog? And I said Sure, again, never having painted a dog before.  For a while I was making some pretty good money doing watercolors of people’s pets.

BIAHADJ: How did you get those contacts?  Was it through word of mouth, or were you advertising?

AM: That’s one of the ways Facebook has really helped me, actually, because it didn’t take me long to realize that if someone posted their dog painting that I had just done and then tagged me in it and said, Hey, look at this dog painting that I just ordered for my girlfriend, I could get two or three more commissions out of that.

BIAHADJ: How long does it take to make a watercolor painting like that?

AM: I can knock one out in a day pretty easily.  That’s the advantage behind watercolor, as opposed to acrylic or oil, is that it’s a much faster process.

BIAHADJ: For your prints I saw that you use Fine Art America, and you talk about how you went through a lot of experimentation arriving at that as a venue.

AM: It was all about trying to figure out the most economical way to use my resources.  This is the problem with watercolor: When you paint an original watercolor, you don’t have something that you can just stick on a wall, like if you’re working with a canvas, because a canvas can just hang on a nail and it doesn’t need a frame.  So you can sell a canvas to someone, and they can take it home and hang it up.  With watercolor, though, you just have a piece of paper that’s wrinkled from water, so you have to figure out a way to mount it or frame it so people can hang it up.  So if I do that, that’s me making a couple hundred dollar investment into a piece that I don’t know is going to sell or not, and if you don’t do that, it doesn’t look like a finished piece.

BIAHADJ: That…sounds like a major hurdle.

AM: So I was trying to come up with a way that I could easily make prints that people could order where they could order the frame with the print.  For a while I used a couple of different places you can upload files to and then they’ll send you prints, like Ritzpix I think is one of them.  I was just doing it on demand, when people would say they couldn’t afford the original work and ask whether I made prints.  And I would say Sure, give me your email, and I would send them prices and they would tell me what they wanted and then I would ship it to them or take it to them.  Then someone told me about Fine Art America where it’s all out of my hands.  I upload the file, and I never even know if someone orders it until the money goes into my Paypal account.  All that time I’m saving is totally worth the cut that Fine Art America takes.  That’s all taken out of my hands, and I think that’s really important.

BIAHADJ: Nice.  For a while I was selling used books online as a side gig, and the amount of time it took to list everything and change prices and then go to the post office was a big investment, and then if I only sold one book and had to drive it to the post office the net gain sometimes didn’t even cover the cost of the gas.

AM: I tried Etsy for a while too, but Etsy was not user-friendly on the seller end.  It’s all the same things you just mentioned, and it’s also a super-saturated market since there’s ten gazillion people painting cacti on Etsy.  I’d be much better off trying to direct traffic to my website, have someone choose me, then go to Fine Art America and buy a print.

BIAHADJ: How long have you had the website?

AM: I’ve redesigned it a few times, but I bought the domain maybe a year before we left Ohio, so 2017.  That was the year I was looking for a job, and it had been a while since I’d looked for a job, and I was seeing that the jobs I was applying to wanted you to have a website.  So I bought a domain, and for a while I tried to code it myself, but again I didn’t have time to teach myself coding and have a forty-hour a week job, and look for jobs AND try to make art, so again I’m happy to spend the twenty-five bucks a month on Squarespace so that it’s good to go.

BIAHADJ: I also think your website showcases a lot of different areas very cleanly, like your writing and your photography and your painting.  Did you design it that way intentionally?

AM: Uh, it was that I couldn’t afford more than one domain name. [laughs] And at the time I made it, it was just photos because I didn’t have any writing that had been published anywhere, I hadn’t made a lot of videos yet, and I hadn’t painted anything.  I’ve just kind of added things in one at a time.  But that’s why I’ve redesigned it a few times, because it’s been a struggle figuring out how to showcase all the stuff I want to showcase.

 

 

IV. Trying to Walk Through Jello

 

BIAHADJ: You’ve mentioned your wife a few times, and her going along on this journey with you.  What was it like making these major life decisions with another person whose needs you also had to consider?

AM: My wife has encouraged me to do anything that I’ve ever done in my life that has been of value.  I would not have dreamed of quitting a well-paying job if she hadn’t said, this is not what you’re supposed to be doing, this is not fulfilling you, and I will do whatever it takes to support you while you get your feet underneath you.

That kind of support system I think is incredibly crucial to anybody who’s trying to create full-time for a living, whether that comes from your wife or a friend or your parents or somebody giving you a little bit of support, whether it’s to crash on their couch or borrow their car so you don’t have a car payment.  Anything that takes the pressure off so you can devote your energy to creativity as opposed to survival is just incredibly important, and underrated.

BIAHADJ: It sounds like there’s a couple of stories behind that…

AM: Oh yeah, I crashed on friends’ couches before I was married multiple times when I didn’t have a place to live.

BIAHADJ: Are we talking for a weekend, or for like six months?

AM: No, like three or four months.  The same was true for my parents: they didn’t give me any stereotypical, “Oh you lazy millennial, I can’t believe you have to move in with us!” stuff.  Then when it was taking longer than I had said it would, they were completely cool.

BIAHADJ: I think having supportive parents, or at least parents who are not unsupportive or negative in some way is a huge, huge boost.  I’m sure you‘ve talked to people whose parents put this weird kind of pressure on them, like Oh, you’re going to law school, right? or When are you going to get a real job? Or the idea that you’re not successful unless you’re making six figures, or you have that master’s degree, or you have a job that’s upper middle class.  Dealing with that kind of parental pressure can be very hard.

AM: Any creative person is going to generate enough doubt and misery just from their own soul—you don’t need it coming from outside sources.

BIAHADJ: So how do you deal with it when it comes?

AM: Oh wow, not very well. [laughs] I struggle with anxiety and depression anyway, so I go through seasons, as most people do with that stuff.  If I’m in an upswing, I’m capable of looking at all those red boxes on Submittable and going, OK, this is just how it is. I’m collecting rejections, this is my mission.  I’m going to collect as many rejections as possible because this is the job.  But in my down periods, it feels like I’m wasting my life.

So I think that my goal is to keep producing, and keep putting the work out there, even if it’s on days when it feels like I’ve worked really hard on an essay and I can’t get it published anywhere, all right, it’s time to move on to the next one, because if I spend too much time worrying about a piece, trying to get it out and get someone to buy it or accept it or publish it, then I’m not producing in that moment.  And then I won’t have anything in a week or two.  So my goal is to stay in a state of producing the work as much as possible.

BIAHADJ: How much time do you find yourself spending on producing new work versus putting the work out there that you’ve already produced?

AM: Oh, I definitely try to spend more time on the work than on getting it out there.  That’s one of the nice things about the internet, is that you can just put something up on Instagram and move on with your life.  But I’m still trying to figure out how to use the internet as a helpful tool and not as a depression-causing time sink.  Facebook—oddly enough, I don’t know if my work just appeals to fifty year-old grandmas, but Facebook has generated a lot of sales for me.  Unfortunately Facebook is way more poisonous to my psyche than Instagram is, so I haven’t figured out a way to be on Facebook to get my work out there and also not engage with people who are being idiots.

BIAHADJ: I’m glad you brought up Facebook, because in one of your infertility posts you made a list of all the child and pregnancy-related posts you’d seen scrolling through your feed, along with all the anguish you were feeling because of the trouble you and your wife were having getting pregnant.  I thought that was one of the best descriptions of a bad social media experience I’d ever read, and it hit me hard even though I’m not trying to have a baby.  So what exactly is your relationship with Facebook?

AM: Oh I’m terrible at it.  I know what I need to be doing, but, again, like a lot of people who struggle with depression, I’m after anything that’s going to give me a squirt of dopamine.  In the last year I’ve done better about not making political posts, which is complicated for me because I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s useless to talk to or argue with people on the internet.  Especially with this administration, I feel there’s value in showing that you don’t stand for that.  But if I make that statement, someone’s going to want to fight with me, and I seem not to be able to just walk away from that and go on with my life and forget about it.  It follows me, it haunts me.  So I’ve forced myself to mostly stop making political or cultural statements on Facebook, because it takes energy from me in a way that I can’t afford to lose.

BIAHADJ: Yes, those political discussions take up a lot of energy.  You always have to reply multiple times and you could have used that time and energy some other way.

AM: You know, I’m just like any other American schmo with a smartphone.  Sometimes I’ll find myself scrolling through social media, and I won’t even remember when I started.  I’ve gone through phases of being better about that.  I’m in a place now where I’m not great at it.  I’ve been better about it in the past, and the goal is to get back to being better about it as quickly as possible.

BIAHADJ: If you were to single out the biggest challenge you’ve faced throughout your journey, what would it be?

AM: It’s depression, there’s no question.  It just makes everything harder.  It feels like switching from running to trying to walk through jello.  Everything’s just ten times harder than it should be.  And what happens is, you tend to blow up your life.  You drop balls, you disconnect from people, and then it’s doubly hard because you have to try to repair those things before you can get your life back together.  The myth of the romantically depressed artist is ridiculous. [laughs] Depression does not make you a better artist.  Any artist who’s been depressed has been able to produce despite depression, certainly not because of depression.  If I could get rid of that with a snap of the fingers, I would, because it would just make the act of creativity easier.

BIAHADJ: And where do you see yourself going in the future?

AM: The end goal here is for me to be making enough from my creative endeavors that I enjoy doing that my wife and I can swap places and she can take a few years to do what I’ve been doing to try to rekindle the professionally creative side of her life, as a performer and as a musician.  So that’s the ultimate goal.

In the short-term, what I would love to do is continue to hone my craft as a writer and try to derive income from that, because it doesn’t rely on computers doing what they’re supposed to be doing.  I would love to write about the outdoors and the things that I love to write about, and have that generate enough income so that it’s sustainable.  So that’s the goal for the short-term.

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You can check out Andrew Marshall’s photography, writing, and other work on his website, follow him on Instagram, or Like his Facebook page (no political arguments, please…).