Feed the Artist First

We’ve spent the last month talking about the creative as a business. The one-pager. The people. The ask. All of it matters. But none of it works if the person behind the work is running on empty. This issue is about something we don’t talk about enough: what it actually means to take care of the artist, not just the work.

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Let’s get into it.

July’s theme: Feed the Artist.

This issue’s prompt is not about your project. It’s about you. Identify one thing outside of your work that you have been postponing, and commit to doing it before the next issue.

It doesn’t have to be a vacation. It doesn’t have to cost anything. But it has to be real, and it has to be something that exists outside the orbit of your creative career. Then answer the following:

1. What have you stopped letting yourself do? Not what you don’t have time for. What have you quietly decided you’ll get back to someday? A place you haven’t been. A thing you used to love before this became your whole life. A conversation you’ve been too in your head to have.
   

2. What experience are you missing that your work actually needs? Think about the last time something surprised you, genuinely, outside of a screen. That surprise is material. Where does it come from for you?
   

3. Name the specific thing. Not “I want to travel more” or “I should take a break.” One specific thing. A day trip. A museum. A dinner with someone you haven’t seen in too long. A morning with no agenda. Name it and put it in your calendar before you close this email.
   

By the end of two weeks, you should have done the thing. Not planned it. Done it. And if it moved something in you, bring it back to the work. That’s the whole point.

Written By Michael Oloyede, Founder of Scene & Heard

I haven’t taken a real vacation in over three years.

I don’t say that like it’s a badge. I say it because I finally feel it, and I think some of you do too. You feel it in the way the ideas stop coming as easily. The way a project that used to excite you now just feels like an obligation. The way you sit down to write or create and nothing is there, and you can’t figure out why, because you’ve been working so hard.

That’s the thing nobody warns you about. The grinding doesn’t just tire your body. It starves your work.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: creativity is not generated from within a vacuum. It is built from the accumulation of experience. The things you’ve seen. The people you’ve sat across from. The places that changed something in you, even quietly. The meals, the roads, the conversations that went nowhere and somehow went everywhere. You can’t manufacture that at a desk. You can’t schedule it between calls. It comes from living, actually living, outside the frame of your work.

And I haven’t been doing that. Not really. I’ve been doing the work, building the thing, showing up every day. And that matters. But the work has been getting thinner, and I think I know why. I stopped feeding the person doing it.

Vacations are the obvious answer, and if you can take one, take one. Not a workcation. Not a trip where you bring the laptop and tell yourself you’ll only check in once a day. A real one. A full stop. The kind where you remember what it feels like to be a person who isn’t defined by their output.

But I know that’s not accessible to everyone, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. So let’s talk about what else you can do, because living well doesn’t require a plane ticket.

1. Go somewhere in your own city you’ve never been. Not the places you pass on the way to somewhere else. Somewhere you’ve had no reason to go until now. Museums. Neighborhoods. A different part of the coastline. A part of your own city that people from other cities visit and you never have. Tourist in your own backyard. It sounds simple because it is, and it works.

2. See live performance. Theater, stand-up, a concert, a reading. Anything that puts you in a room with people who made a thing and chose to share it live. There is something about the immediacy of a live performance, the fact that it cannot be paused or rewatched, that wakes you back up.

3. Talk to people outside your industry. This is underrated. Get into a real conversation with someone who has no idea what you do, who has no career adjacency to yours, who thinks about the world in a completely different way. Let their frame of reference expand yours. Ask them what they’re working on, what they care about, what keeps them up. You will come back to your work changed.

4. Read something that has nothing to do with your field. Not a craft book. Not industry coverage. Something about history, science, philosophy, a culture you know nothing about. The best creative work is almost always the result of two unrelated things colliding in someone’s mind. You can engineer those collisions.

5. Sit with silence. Not meditation, if that’s not your thing. Just quiet. No podcast, no playlist, no background noise. Let your brain go wherever it goes. This is where the unexpected ideas live. They’ve been waiting for you to stop filling every minute.

The artist you are is made of everything you’ve experienced. When you stop experiencing things, you stop becoming. And when you stop becoming, the work gets smaller, even if you’re working harder.

I’m not taking a real vacation yet. But I’m starting to understand that I have to. And while I’m building toward that, I’m making a commitment to actually live in the meantime. To go somewhere. See something. Sit with someone. Be curious about something that has nothing to do with my career.

If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself in it, I hope you’ll do the same. The work will be better for it. You will be better for it.

You have to live first. The rest follows.

What’s moving in the industry this week.

TIFF 2026 Lineup Is Here. Chris Rock. Rebel Wilson. Courteney Cox. Jesse Eisenberg. Peter Farrelly with a Stallone biopic. Siân Heder opens the festival. The path to directing is not always through film school. Deadline, July 2026.

The Odyssey Opens to $124 Million, Nolan’s Biggest Ever. $124.5M domestic. $264M global. His biggest worldwide opening ever. Original, ambitious filmmaking still commands a theater audience. Variety, July 2026.

Hollywood Employment Is Down 30% and Productions Keep Leaving Los Angeles. 73,000 production jobs lost since 2022. Two-thirds of them here. The Avengers are shooting in London. Spaceballs 2 is in Australia. This is not background noise. It is the context we are all working inside of. Variety, July 2026.