The title Art versus Commercialism Part 1 is a declaration of intent.
Next year, I’m going to work out something worthwhile to say on the subject. I’d wavered about whether to have a go at starting on it today – it’s such a massive (tired?) topic – but then I read this by Lynda Waterhouse in her Art Matters post here on ABBA on Dec 12:
“I also encourage ‘slow looking’ at art; an almost meditative process of paying attention and noticing. We are bombarded by so many images that we are in danger of not really taking the time to look around us.”
And I felt that this was so true it seemed serendipitous, a prod to begin my journey of slow looking at writing as art at a time when life – real and online – seems overwhelmingly commercial and the craft of storytelling a conveyor belt supplying an increasingly homogenised product.
Lynda’s words fell on fertile ground since I’d been primed to think about Art with a big A by several things I read this week, including advice by Sol Stein in his (rather dated) guide, Stein on Writing, that the entire point of fiction is to elicit an emotional response from readers.
Frankly, it was the last thing I needed to hear since these days, for most of us, readers will only be found via the tortuous time-suck of self-marketing whether we are trad or self-published. As I’m still leaning towards trad for the C17th witchy WIP, finding readers will also mean the stress of enticing another agent to represent me (the lovely Jane Willis having retired from United Agents this year) and then finding an editor who shares the agent’s opinion about the commercial viability of my work, a sales team who’ll back the editor’s judgment, and a publishing director who’ll agree with the sales people, and then, if I’m tremendously lucky, a contract – with or without an advance – and, fingers crossed, something akin to a marketing budget.
I mean, what has any of that got to do with writing, let alone art? TBH, I’d rather put the manuscript on a thumb drive and send it out to sea in a bottle, AKA the Devon version of Kindle self-publishing.
But enough of cynicism. Sol Stein was an editor first and foremost and therefore represents a corner of the book industry. Writing is about more than raw material for publishers. It is a gift and a privilege. We should cherish gifts and be conscious of privilege.
Perhaps, then, this is the debate I’m having with myself – and hopefully also here on ABBA: why be a writers if our readership is likely to be limited to a few hundred people? Is one reader enough? Fifty? And what other outcomes might justify years of research, thought, practice, experiment, experience, and the application of imagination?
So, yeah, what is the point of it all?
I’m aware this question strays into the old art for art’s sake debate: does a work needs any purpose beyond itself? And I don’t want to go down the purely personal psychological route either, as that seems too self-referential. Yes, creativity is self-enriching – or self-escaping – but that’s equally true of cross-stich or photography, and I’d like to consider writing as something unique.
Part II of Art versus Commercialism will therefore need to define parameters for these posts and set out a less dull question than ‘what’s the point?' I hope the answers might spiral off wildly and bounce around and return to beginnings like stories used to be able to do before ‘they’ told us the right way to do it.
It may be a huge waste of time, of course, and as purposeless a fiction writing, but hey, I’ve got a creative writing PhD thesis to write next year. All contributions welcome.
Happy Christmas.
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