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When we were kids, my brother and I spent many happy hours together listening to Steve Martin’s standup act.

Yes, listening—on albums on my aunt and grandmother’s record player, because this was before Netflix comedy specials, even before VCRs, and if you didn’t see a comedian live, which as kids of course we wouldn’t have, that was your option.

I think the strong appeal Martin had for us was that we had never heard anything like him. I come from a funny family, and we were not unfamiliar with comedy and standup, from Flip Wilson to Carol Burnett to George Carlin and Richard Pryor. We watched Saturday Night Live as a family growing up together.

Steve Martin was just so damned weird and unusual. The cover of his Wild and Crazy Guy album featured Martin, a silver-haired adult wearing a suit, captured in a ridiculous awkward dance pose wearing his signature bunny ears. On Let’s Get Small it was a balloon hat and a Groucho nose and glasses. Comedy Is Not Pretty featured him in bold hot-pink blush and lipstick.

His comedy was cerebral yet silly, Martin wearing an arrow through the head while making offbeat observations that made you laugh, then made you ponder, and hit just the right place on my funny bone. My brother and I still make regular references to bits of his act, threatening when his kids were young to  teach them to talk wrong, and when he got divorced I suggested he say, “I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee,” and then throw dog poop on her shoes.

Whenever anyone loses their train of thought, one of us immediately jumps in with, “Oh, I remember, I’m radioactive. Shake!” This used to and still does drive my mother crazy. “What does it mean?” she would complain. We didn’t know and I still don’t, and yet it continues to make me laugh—more than forty years after we heard it in one of Martin’s acts.

Steve Martin is an original, but I don’t think I realized how much until recently watching the documentary Steve! on Apple TV, a two-parter that digs deep into the origins of his career and how he built it in so many different creative arenas. I found so much of his journey inspiring and instructive for writers, a rich blueprint for how to build a happy and fulfilling creative life.

Art Takes Work

The first thing that struck me was that I’d had no idea how much deliberation and work and planning went into the standup routines that seemed so spontaneous and fluid. The documentary shows how meticulously Martin planned out his act, filling stacks of notebooks with ideas and thoughts, feedback on how his set went, always building and honing and creating.

When we read a brilliantly written book, one that draws us in and carries us effortlessly through it, it’s so easy to compare our own efforts and find them wanting when held up against another author’s finished product, one that likely went through endless development and countless revisions. One that may have been the result of many years of learning craft and practicing it, of many previous books, and plenty of failures we may never see.

It’s so easy to compare our own efforts and find them wanting when held up against another author’s finished product, one that likely went through endless development and countless revisions.

Writers may examine their own early drafts and stories through that lens and get discouraged, deciding they don’t have what it takes to reach that author’s level.

We see the finished product—the performance, not the rehearsal. The Steve! documentary shows just how much of the latter goes into the former, and reminds us that the road to creating the kinds of stories we admire is long and often difficult, and almost always invisible to the reader.

Martin started very small, doing private parties, then moving to opening for other people, getting bigger gigs and fine-tuning and realizing who his audience was—and wasn’t, like a gig with the famed Playboy Club where his act flamed out.

Yet he was also willing to recognize his successes. He valued himself and his work. He treated it like a business. When he realized that many of his opening gigs were costing him more than they were netting him, he realized he needed to change his business model. He began seeking higher-paid work, believing he deserved it and had earned it.

He knew when it was time to level up and continue to push himself and his work to grow his career. He was constantly working and fine-tuning his material, not resting on his laurels—always taking audience and feedback into account, but using it to shape and develop his own voice and vision, not change it.

Commit to Yourself and Your Art

Along the way, Steve Martin found, developed, and honed his own unique voice. That’s the soul of any creative product and can be among the most challenging elements to discover and create—and to commit to, taking ownership of your own artistic expression and letting it reflect you in all your shades and nuances, even when that voice may not have the broadest appeal. Even when it may be dismissed as “too weird” or “too much” or “too narrow.”

When he realized his silly humor was heightened the more “adult” he looked as his hair became prematurely gray, he committed to that, donning suits that became his trademark. And sure enough, a besuited silver-haired grown-ass adult contorting in wild dances onstage wearing a fake arrow through his head, making gleefully childish jokes, resonated with growing audiences.

The documentary strikingly shows the scathing reviews Martin received early in his career, the dismissal of his work and its worth—and how he weathered that censure, used it not only to improve his work, but to continue to define and more thoroughly commit to his own style.

My favorite story is when, after one comedy show, Martin’s audience, growing used to expecting odd things from him, didn’t leave the venue when the show was over, apparently thinking that the end was just a “bit.”

So Steve went out into the audience, chatting with them, eventually leaving the building and inviting them to follow—and soon a large crowd was trailing him out into the street. It became almost a trademark of his shows for a while, this entourage of fans following along behind him through town after—as part of?—his shows.

Martin took what developed organically in his act and leaned into it, and the shtick became not just popular, but attention-getting, increasing his profile even further—he was “that comic people followed out into the street.” He developed a cult following like rock stars often have, a phenomenon of no other comic to that point. Fans showed up for his shows wearing bunny ears and arrows through the head—en masse, drawn to his strange, unique, inimitable style.

What is your own “weird”? What part of who you are, your own unique personality and style, can you infuse into your work to give it your singular voice? How can you lean even more into that as your writing develops?

Explore—and Incorporate—All Your Creativity

Steve Martin is more than a stand-up comedian. He’s a creative, and his creativity takes many forms. Before he became a comedian he wanted to be a magician, a field he found he didn’t have a gift for. But his study of magic informed his comedy and became one of his hallmarks: witness the aforementioned balloon hats, and his Great Flydini routine, one of Johnny Carson’s favorites that brought Martin onto his show for a command performance.

He loved music, and became an extraordinarily adept banjo player over many years of practice. That found its way into his comedy too (“You just can’t sing a depressing song when you’re playing a banjo: ‘Oh, death and grief and sorrow and murder!’”).

But it also led to a whole new branch of his career. Martin is an acclaimed musician in his own right, playing and touring with top bluegrass acts, and he’s still incorporates his music into the standup act with Martin Short that he’s performing to this day.

Steve Martin reminds us that we are more than just our writing, and that everything we do, every creative pursuit that interests us, is not just important for its own sake, for our happiness and well-being and creative fulfillment, but can enrich and inform our writing and our stories. It can lead us into other avenues of creative exploration and expression—fresh genres and mediums for our writing, other creative pursuits unrelated or adjacent to it, but equally fulfilling. It enriches our art and us as artists.

Know What You Want, and Be Willing to Change Gears

In 1980, at the pinnacle of his standup career, Martin walked away from it.

He wanted to move into movies—so he did, bolting out of the gate into cinematic superstardom with The Jerk, a cult classic he penned and starred in. (Ask me how many lines from that movie my husband and I still quote.)

He had some failures—Pennies from Heaven flopped at the box office—but he was stretching himself, learning tap dance in eight months for that film, and pursuing a personal artistic vision and goal. And amid what became an extensive filmography he had plenty more successes—Three Amigos!, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Father of the Bride, Little Shop of Horrors (as the memorably sadistic dentist), Roxanne.

And then he walked away from movies too when it started to feel to him like too much work for the payoff, saying in the documentary, “You know, you pour your heart into these movies…then two years later it’s just another title on the video shelf.” (Sound familiar, authors?)

He knew what he wanted to do and kept adapting to figure out how to make his work more fulfilling, more “him,” moving into music and finally back into standup, now partnering with Martin Short—a kindred spirit he first worked with in 1985 on Three Amigos!—after realizing he liked working as part of a team.

Their partnership yielded yet another creative branching-out for Martin: to TV, with his hugely popular and acclaimed Only Murders in the Building, his Golden Globe nominated series with Short and Selena Gomez.

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The Steve! documentary is a fascinating portrait of an artist many may dismiss as just a rubber-faced, silly-acting comedian—one that shows the level of dedication, artistry, and commitment required from creatives if we’re to build careers that are deeply personal and meaningful to us, that bring us happiness and fulfillment on our own terms.

Martin achieved enormous success by most any metric—fame, fortune, and creative freedom.

No creative has control over the first two. If it happens we’re beyond fortunate; the percentage of artists garnering big money and wide renown for their creative work is vanishingly small.

But we all have control over the third: freedom to pursue our creative work on our own terms, to express our truest voice, to share our work however we see fit.

To me, that’s my biggest takeaway from Martin’s career and the documentary: that the most meaningful creative career is the one we build for ourselves.

Authors, are you Steve Martin fans? I recommend not just the documentary, but listening to some of his early standup on his albums; it’s so uniquely his own and holds up so well to this day—and is a side of him that younger fans may never have known. What resonates for you in his approach to  his art? Who inspires you in your writing, and why?

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