No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
- Samuel Johnson
Just read an interview of a famous author in which she said that she wrote only for herself. She said that if she had never been published, that would have been fine. The story was all to her, and she had to please herself, not her readers.
I was unable to read past that point.
Really? So it was merely by chance that her book ended up in the hands of an agent who auctioned it to a publisher who then sent her on a seventeen city tour? And the blog and tweets and her online efforts to sell her book were only an afterthought?
I've read and heard other authors claim that same thing or variations thereof. I've noticed they never say it until they're famous and have made a lot of money. And then it's expected that they deny they're commercial writers. No, they write for the love of writing and not for the money. Then why not just keep a diary? Why not give the book away for free? (Ebooks make that possible now.) I think it's easy to turn your nose up at that filthy money when you have plenty of it.
Well, I'm not ashamed to say I want to be paid. I write books so they can be sold. If I thought no one would ever read Murder by the Mile and never buy it, I wouldn't write it. Well, I might, but I would take my time and probably throw in a few flying robot monkeys. But I figure I'd write other things. I've always written something, be it poetry, plays, articles, whatever. Kept a journal since I was 10 and read that writers were supposed to. Later, I wrote in it to complain about how terrible my parents were and then how wonderful my college years were and then how not-so-terrible my parents had become over the years and so on until now. My journal will never be published -- in fact, I would be horrified if anyone else ever read it. My point is that I understand only writing for yourself; what I don't understand is why authors lie about wanting to paid for their work.
It's like writing isn't serious if it's written for a commercial purpose. Not arty enough.
Well, whatever. People lie to themselves all the time. If they want to consider that they're writing only for art's sake, fine, but it sure doesn't explain the number of vampire cyborg books out there right now.
Writing for money: it's a good thing.
4 comments:
But, Stephen, to some extent, you DO write for yourself. Why do I say that? In the comments of your posting of the results of your contest entry for Murder by the Acre, you call it your "baby." That's hardly the words a man writing for the money would use.
Yes, you want to make money from your writing, but I'd suggest you're also writing very much for yourself, too.
Well, that's true enough, Jean. I would never deny that I care and hope for the best for my writing children. I just want to be paid for them!
Actually, my point was the hypocrisy that some writers adopt about money. It's obvious that I don't only write for money. For instance, my plays have made a nice bit of money, but they took years to do so. But hearing an audience laugh and applaud -- that's awesome. Approval, money, connection, communication -- I imagine all those are part of why a writer writes.
I suspect many writers write for multiple reasons -- as you've listed. While I believe it's possible for a famous author to write just for themselves as your example stated, I also believe it's not likely to be that simple.
When you are famous, you do have to present an image in public -- hopefully one that's close enough to the real you that you can pull it off. Famous author has probably decided she can't reliably pull off conversations related to money and the business side of writing -- or has decided for various reasons not to discuss those areas, so the safe topic for her is the act of writing for her own pleasure and how thrilled she is that others find value in it too. And she probably is.
Few things are ever as simple and straightforward as they seem.
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