The fact that bad writing can sometimes make a lot of money used to offend me. “What!” my 17-year-old self once cried in outrage. “I could write better garbage than this! Where’s *my* mansion and limo and things?” And then I would hear about great writers who die penniless and I would be filled with this sense of grief…that a craft, an art form I had dedicated so much of my life to, could be so much less to most people.
It’s not even that you could say that the art of writing is misunderstood. It isn’t. Everybody knows novels are entertaining. It’s the nuances that escape so many others. The ones that make the difference between a novel to read to pass the time and one that speaks from the heart, that offers a reflection about a time and a place, or a life so different from yours. And it was so hard to explain then, but the grief got to a point where I tried to go on a crusade of sorts. I made friends and a ton of enemies, and I tried to explain, in so many ways, what I thought was wrong.
I don’t think all that effort was futile. What is youth, after all, but a time to bring out all that reckless impudence so that life could knock you down a notch? I became an adult–got a family, a job, learned more about the world–and I realized something: it is not the fault of the system that a bad product sells. That is simply how things are. Businesses don’t care about art, unless it sells, and even then. The money all has to do with how the business itself is run: an entirely different craft, by the end of the day.
Where does that leave the artist? Often, the whole process of breaking it down to numbers and figures and marketing strategies leaves us feeling invalidated–because we feel that nobody is going to notice that on page 54, line 2, we used the phrase “seated himself” instead of “sat” because it showed how mechanical our main character thought of himself in relation to the world. But rest assured: at least one person will. YOU will, reading your work years and years from now, even as the memory of having written it has faded and you wonder at this book you hold in your hands, at the process that brought it out from nothing into existence.
When bad art sells, it sells. We are asking too much of our readers if we expect them to eschew these products in favour of ones we deem superior. Forget subjectiveness, we artists need to understand that editing Chapter 5 *just one more time* we will not help us sell more of that book. The money side of this whole fiction thing has its own little world. You could ignore the art side too, if you want. Just make sure your manuscript is clean, technically and grammatically correct–for the sanity of your readers, if nothing else. No, really; you probably won’t go to hell for it.
But the art part? I’m sorry; only you and the readers who know the craft will appreciate it. That curb you were stepping on a few days ago, when that truck swung to the right and somehow–magically–avoided you anyway. Did you appreciate the fine-tuning that went into designing that curb? Probably not, but the fact that someone cared meant you’re still alive today. Maybe the subtle details and care that went into your writing will never save a life, but then again, maybe it will. Who knows. Only you can decide if you really give a damn.
