What forces stimulate artists’ best work?

I’ve always been put off when journals issue themed calls for submissions. I don’t see how a writer can be expected to produce quality work, at short notice, when so conceptually constrained. That’s not to say that such calls might not provide an opportunity if you happen to have something already in the back of a cloud folder, that can be tweaked to fit the theme. But it’s an odd way to go about things—redolent of art classes and ‘creative writing’ courses, giving people a topic to tinker with.

I was reminded recently that there isn’t just one optimum way of getting the best out of yourself. Awake in the night (a recurring problem throughout my life) I was listening to a transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations on R3. (Yes, the work is believed to have been composed for an insomniac ‘for the refreshment of their spirits’, and it fulfils the brief: but that’s not my point here). Some people regard this as the greatest single piece of music ever composed (that’s a conversation-starter, not a falsifiable assertion); and it’s worth remembering that it was a commission. Most of Bach’s work was essentially contract work, to earn a living and keep doing what he was good at. Did he already have in mind, in a notebook somewhere, the sublime aria that begins and ends this particular masterpiece? Or did it just come to him when he sat down to get on with the job? Was he hurried by a deadline or relaxed at the absence of one? It would be fascinating to know how this work came about. (Angela Hewitt’s exquisite COVID lockdown recording of the aria is here).

It seems to me that most of the art that we make efforts to engage with, comes about through a combination of the need to earn a living; an impulse to create; the expression of a talent; and the individual need to achieve something. I suggest, for example, that much poetry is generated mainly because of the impulse factor. Whereas for many composers, earning a living has been the predominant factor. But it varies. After the early years, Picasso did not need to earn a living from his work but remained extraordinarily productive, impelled to create. Or consider Virginia Woolf. It’s true that for a time she needed to generate income from writing (mostly through reviews) but throughout, what drove her to express her complex insights in fictional form was the impulse to create and her individual need to achieve. If she’d not had sufficient wealth and therefore time in her day-to-day life (and a room of her own of course) it seems highly unlikely that her best work would have been stimulated by a journal inviting submissions on, say, ‘lighthouses’ or ‘posh people’s parties’.