Should Writing Be an Art or a Career?
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Like math or woodcarving, writing is a skill which on the most basic level accomplishes a workaday task, and with more sophistication may produce beauty. Maybe all arts are on that spectrum, which starts with necessity and ends with aesthetics.
On the professional side: Writing is commercialized for various purposes. Journalists are paid to convey facts; columnists perform acts of middle-brow cleverness; and novelists arrange words to produce emotions.
All of those products are substitutable goods. Radio, TV and the Internet have left the industries of the written word in ruins. Newspapers, publishing, you name it -- there are no barriers to entry any more. Writing has been largely commodified.
This has a lot of consequences. One is a decline in marketing budgets for new books. Unless a novel is sure to sell, and even then, a publishing house will offload the task of promoting the book to the writer. So half a writer's life will be spent barnstorming from one book-signing to the next.
This is compounded by the networking they must do to land a book deal in the first place. Like startup founders, authors need to make something that people want, and then find a way to distribute it. Networking is all about solving the distribution problem, getting noticed. Nobody else will do it for you...
I'll distribute it. Anyone with an internet connection can put a novel in front of millions rather easily. The problem isn't one of distribution but monetization. Book publishers, like movie studios, know there are only so many dollars to be spent each year on books. So whether a particular book is marketable has as much to do with what else is happening in that market.
Markets can only absorb so many spy thrillers or romantic romps in a given timeframe. Quality is now arguably secondary. If you accept that, then it is not difficult to understand that publishers do not always go with the best book. Instead they turn to reliable sources, especially friends and previous authors. Networking and name recognition become the entire game --> the rise of ghostwriting.
You can be completely devoted to something for your entire life, without being paid for it, to the point of being a complete master - that's not a hobby.
Ya um, the term "writing" is broader than writing books. Writing is a career for many, including myself. That doesn't mean we sit in NY brownstones creating an "atmosphere of gloom and misanthropy."
So ... misleading title. Writing is a skill that is an essential part of many careers. It therefore should not be approach as anything less. Writing novels is an art, something that a precious few are good enough to turn into a career but should be approached first as art.
Edit: If anything, aren't the traditional dichotomies art vs. craft and career vs. hobby? Typically speaking, it's widely acknowledged that artists have careers.
(One surprising but evidently true thesis of _Albion's Seed_ and _Bound Away_: slavery came first, economic uses for slavery came later. In the Southern aristocrat's estimation, you couldn't be a gentleman without having peasants to tug their forelocks to you -- and free indentured servants proved impossible to keep on the plantation.)
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. [1]
[1] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...
One thing in particular he said that struck me was that one should write as if they were already dead. That is to pull no punches. A great but hard to attain goal.
Until you realize that you are one of a teeming multitude of people doing the same thing. You can't just post something and have it instantly lauded. Oh, no. You've got to build an audience. You've got to make something interesting enough that your fans tell their friends about it, and some of them become new fans who do the same.
And if you've become your own publisher? Well, you get to learn that there's a lot more to publishing than just putting your stuff in a form people can physically read(/watch/play/etc). There's designing an appealing package for your work. There's distributing your physical product, if you have one.
And there's promotion. Yep. There sure is promotion. Did you know that it often even costs money?
You want to get to the point where you can do it as a living? Better learn something about promotion. Nope, it's not what you signed on for. Nope, it's not what you passionately want to be good at. Yeah, it takes time away from improving your craft, and as soon as you can afford it maybe you'll want to find some way to pay someone else to do it so you can get back to making the work. But first you need the money to pay someone to do it for you.
Otherwise? Well, you can live off of someone else's money and wait to be "discovered". Good luck with that.
Or, with the internets, they can spend a bit of their spare time between deadline crunches and occasional promo trips blogging, tweeting, and answering fan email and blog comments. Or even podcasting or commenting on HN (cstross, e.g.).