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I always start my workshops by asking, “Why write a grant?”

“The money,” my students respond like it’s the dumbest question they’ve ever heard.

“Yeah, the money.” I say. “But why else besides the money?”

“Isn’t the only reason the money?” They want to know.

“No,” I tell them. “Money should never be the only reason.”

Why? Because getting a grant is a crapshoot. There are so many reasons you might not win funding that have nothing to do with your application. Perhaps this year nobody on the judging panel liked watercolors. Or all the applicants did an A-plus job. Or your worst enemy was on the panel. For these and a million other reasons—all beyond your control—you can ace the application and still not win the award.

​If that’s the case, why waste your time? Why write a grant? If money is your only reason, then you might be better off working a couple more gigs to earn the funds to take that research trip, buy those supplies, or stage your next performance art installation. In fact, if you need money fast, some of the fundraising strategies explored in chapter 11 are better than a grant.

Before you launch into a grant application, ask yourself, Is applying for this grant the best use of my time, or would my time be better spent creating new work? Your time is a precious commodity. How you spend it will change the course of your life. Grant applications are projects unto themselves, and they’ll take time away from your other pursuits, personal and professional.

​If you decide to apply for a grant, make sure you’re benefiting from the grant-writing process. That way, you win whether you receive the money or not. And if, after you’ve started the application, you realize that you’d be better off working more hours at your day job or actually working on your project, allow yourself to quit. There’s always next year’s deadline or another grant that will be the right fit another time.

All that said, why should you apply for a grant? To help you decide whether the process is worth it, consider all of the potential benefits.

Get Out There

Your grant application will be reviewed by at least one but likely several people—usually artists. This panel of your peers immerse themselves in your work, your plans for your project, and your aspirations. After this review process, they’ll know more about you as an artist than your best friend, your spouse, or even your mother. Chances are excellent that you’ll run into some of these peers again when they could help publish or promote your work. So even if a particular grant doesn’t get funded, you may end up with several big fans who may be helpful to your career somewhere down the road.

Cure Procrastination

A grant application deadline forces you to get your ideas down on paper and create a plan for realizing what you want. When I wrote my grant proposal to fund creating a website for my work as a writer, I had to interview web designers, research software that would allow me to update the website on my own, and plan the site launch. Working on the application helped me develop an action list and provided a deadline; both were invaluable. I was forced to make an exhaustive plan that detailed why I needed a website now, how I would use the site to promote my work, and how I would update it inexpensively. Without the deadline, my new website would have slipped to the bottom of my to-do list.

​As it turned out, I received a professional development grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, Oregon, to pay for website creation. But even if I hadn’t, writing the grant was a free workshop on planning, designing, and launching a website, which my career needed.

Hone the Big Idea

The grant-writing process is a way to find your own answers to the big questions about your next project. It forces you to ask questions like: Can I do this work? How will this work add to the world of visual art (or of literature, or of performance)? It compels you to articulate not only what kind of art you make but also why and how you make it.

Many artists—even writers—don’t like to explain why they do what they do. They don’t want to dissect the meaning of their art. “Artists don’t like to be nailed down,” said artist Rita Robillard. “With good art we crave indeterminacy, and that seems in conflict with clarity.” Some artists feel that if it can be said in words then what’s the point of making it? The challenge then becomes how to be clear while maintaining the poetry.

Poet Mary Szybist, who won a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship for her second book of poetry, has a love/hate relationship with being forced to articulate what she’s working toward when she writes. She wonders whether too much explaining takes away from the work. “Poems have to have space to take on lives of their own,” she said. “The danger of articulating what a poem is about is that it could lead to being overdetermined and take the life out of the work.” On the other hand, the process of articulation can be useful. “There can be something very generative about being forced ​to articulate a theme or an idea,” she said. The process of writing her grant led her to decide on the central motif that shaped and informed her second book.

Not all daydreams are meant to be realized; some ideas are better left on the cocktail napkin. The process of grant writing lets you test the worthiness of an idea before you invest time and money into it. You may find that the more you research and write about your idea, the less you want to do it. Better to learn this while it’s still a pipe dream and not a full-blown project, so you can move on to the next idea and not waste time daydreaming about a project you don’t want to do.

Ask for Help

Why do humans hate asking for help? Maybe the two-year-old inside us likes to say, “I did it myself!” The truth is, no successful person is an island. We need our colleagues and friends to help us realize our aspirations, and they need us to help them. Writing a grant proposal says to the world, “I want this, my idea is worth supporting, and I need help.” This step can be scary and humbling, but it’s good practice for all the other asking you’ll need to do for the rest of your career.

I have asked printers to donate services or provide a discount in exchange for an acknowledgment in a program. I have asked friends and colleagues to donate $10 to $25 so that I could show on an application that I had raised some of my own money to pay for tuition at a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Asking made me feel uncomfortable. Some people didn’t return my phone calls or respond to my notes. Then, a few people wrote me checks for $50 and a local deli gave me wine and food platters for an opening-night reception. The asking wasn’t easy; sometimes it was embarrassing. But I found out who wanted to help, who wanted to join in on my project, and this was a huge boost both to me and my project.

​Practice Persistence

The more grant writing you do, the better you will become at it. With each proposal you write, you learn to express yourself more clearly, to strategize, and to express your big vision to other people.

“Every grant you apply for you’re shaping your ideas more and more,” said Christa Blatchford, former program director at the New York Foundation for the Arts. And it shows your determination: “Some organizations want you to apply multiple times before they give you a big grant because they want to know that you’re dying to do this project, not that this project is something you just dreamed up because you want the money.”

Persistence of vision is a good thing, and you never know where the proposal can take you. Jon Lapointe, former executive director of Side Street Projects, told me about an artist in one of his grant-writing workshops who had composed an excellent proposal that included a project narrative, artist statement, and ten good slides of her work. She had just been accepted into a gallery but had been relegated to the back room. Then the gallerist announced an upcoming art show and asked the artists to send him press materials. “She had her stuff ready and she sent it to the gallerist and guess what? LA Times, front page, full color,” said Lapointe. “She had her shit together, she was ready to respond to a situation.” And her readiness was thanks to the one proposal, which had become a useful tool in her toolbox.

Win More Than Money

If you get the funding, then you win all of the above benefits, and one more thing that every artist I’ve ever met desires: validation. “Receiving a grant is a wonderful thing. Money is only part of it,” said playwright George Taylor. “With fellowships, which are very competitive, winning means credibility. It’s a shot in the arm. After I received the Oregon Arts Commission fellowship, I was no longer embarrassed to introduce myself ​as a playwright. For a fourth-career playwright, that’s very motivational. The grant made it difficult to want to write anything else but the play.”

While working on the manuscript that the NEA eventually funded, Szybist wondered, Are the poems working? Is this project worth pursuing? “I cycled thorough periods of faith and doubt, both about the poems and the project as a whole,” she said. Receiving the grant restored her faith in her own work. “To have the NEA select my work for this distinction is a great gift of validation,” she said. “A grant is a boost of adrenaline to the writing process.”

Is now the time in your career to apply for a grant? Sometimes the only way to find out is to start. You’ll learn something about yourself, your career, and your project, no matter what.

Be honest: Would applying for a grant help clarify the next step in your art life, or would it just be another way to procrastinate instead of getting back to the studio or the writing desk? If you don’t know, choose a project that would benefit from some focused time. Set aside one uninterrupted hour in your studio to sketch an idea for your next project. For now, be selfish; don’t concern yourself with “helping others.” Pick a project you’re dying to create. What would it take to support this project—a residency? a project grant? What’s your vision of the final piece? Imagine walking through the installation at the unveiling, attending the concert on opening night, or reading from the finished book of stories to clarify this vision.

After one hour, ask yourself whether you feel more or less excited. If more, can you call someone right now to collaborate on one aspect of this? Can you present a portion to your artist group? Would spending many more focused hours writing a proposal for ​this project help move your art further into the world? If yes, then get to work.