The Art vs. the Business of Writing

The art of (creative) writing involves drawing on your emotional reserves to create something new. It requires an investment in imagination, emotion, and skill. It asks for the force of effort to get a work started followed by perceptive and collaborative resignation once the work starts to take on its own life. It involves a dialectic between the author as the creator of the new work and the author as the reader of his or her own work. The art of writing is a deeply personal investment in an outside thing in which you grasp at anything — any past experience, any memory, any fleeting thought or feeling — in order to fully realize something that you only imagined before.

The business of creative writing involves subjecting your work to editors who care about an audience who will be paying for your work. It involves subjecting your work to publishers who will own it — your work is no longer your own, or at least not exclusively your own — because they will have invested monetarily and otherwise in its publication. The business of creative writing often means trying to sell different revisions of the same thing over and over again, tediously, to different venues, or sometimes having your publisher do that for you. It often means paying close attention to the tedious details of specific formatting. It means subjecting your voice somewhat to a house style. It means, sometimes, working with editors and publishers who aren’t great readers. It means, sometimes, working with editors and publishers who are great readers, and then facing the facts about your own work from their eyes. It means reading and signing contracts, for better or for worse. It means letting go of that thing that you invested so much time and effort in making just right. When published, it also means letting go of it to readers, who will take it any way they want and say about it anything that they want.

The act of publishing creative writing involves both. From the artist’s or creator’s standpoint, the business end can be awful. But if you go into it accepting that once you’ve finished creating your work you have to adopt a businessperson’s attitude toward it, taking into account the point of view and interests of all constituencies involved in its publication, the business end may not be so onerous. Perhaps this is another form of resignation. But, I think, this form of resignation helps authors take control.