Why can’t I just write whatever I want?
The pain of turning the creative into the commercial
Writing is a craft, an art. I love the idea of keeping it that way, of writing exactly what I want to write.
I could stick to that philosophy. I could write for myself, for joy, for expression, to gather my thoughts or for many, many other totally legitimate reasons that aren’t about selling books (for more on this look at What do you want from your writing life).
When I paint, that’s exactly what I do. I paint for me. I don’t sell my work so I don’t have to worry if what I paint is trendy, or commercially viable or if anyone will like it. But, for some mad reason, I decided to make my writing into a commercial thing. And if like me you write for a living, the art you make does need to become a product; something people will buy. For me, this is one of the hardest parts of writing.
The best work, the most original stuff DOES come from the heart, from whatever spark of creativity we have inside us. But then I have to take a project I made using my heart, my creativity, my SOUL, and tweak it to suit whatever market I’m aiming at.
In traditional publishing, that involves gatekeepers who will say things to me like ‘I like the core idea but could you just …’ or ‘Giraffes aren’t in at the moment. I’m thinking we could have a llama…’ or ‘Could you rewrite this totally and set it underwater…’
It’s tough, and it hurts. But the commercial voices kinda have a point. I do want to sell work. I do need to make a living.
The longer I do this job, the more I realise we are actually in the fashion industry. The fact is, readers buy books for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your craft: ‘my granddaughter is obsessed with trucks’ ‘That book looks like a pretty present’ ‘I need something for two-year-old, what are other people buying?’
So many books are bought in supermarkets, in a dash round the aisles. Gift shops are another example of this. A parent is often looking for a memory-thing to buy or something to please their child or keep them quiet. Here’s my book in the British Library giftshop. It was next to soft toys, pens, card, puzzles - any of which a parent might have bought instead of a book.
In this respect, your book is just a product. And sometimes parents will spend more on a coffee shop visit (sob) than a book. A trendy animal on the cover CAN mean your book sells. So maybe a publisher is right to change my giraffe to a llama?
As authors/illustrators we have to find a place somewhere between ‘write what you love’ and ‘write for the market’. We want readers. We want to sell books. But we also want the work to still feel like ours.
How do we find the right balance?
I try to hold on to the most important elements in my work. I make a list of what I want to say in terms of theme. I identify the spark of originality that made me want to write the story in the first place and clutch on to that through each round of edits. For my Before the Fairy Tale series, my agent sent out one book and my publisher decided they wanted a completely different book BUT they understood what I wanted to do. I wanted to write the backstories of fairy tale characters. They got that, they just wanted a different fairy tale. That felt reasonable, and I still kept my core idea.
I keep my work to the highest quality of craft I can. Even if I’m doing something super commercial, I put love and care and joy into it. I want to be proud of everything I write. That’s a vague yardstick but so far, it’s kept me on track.
We need to be comfortable with the idea of writing things that never get published. I write whole books that my agent turns down or publishers don’t take. But I’m trying. I’m risking putting my heart-based work out there. And sometimes that pays off.
I also write stuff that’s for me; weird projects that wouldn’t suit the market at all. I think of the additional stuff the way an artist might think of their sketchbook. I’m developing my craft. I’m making a library of thoughts and ideas that might one day turn into something more commercial. Someone once said drafts are like the sand you later use to build the sandcastle. Boy, do I have a lot of sand!
It’s useful to have a healthy amount of mad hope. I’ve talked about hope before - and how important it is to fuel us. Try not to let the negative voices tell you there’s no point or nobody will like your weird work. Instead let the (slightly insane) over-optimistic voice take over. This is going to be amazing! Wow, Spielberg is TOTALLY going to make a film of this. Let yourself go crazy imagining the good stuff. Do your Carnegie award speech into a hairbrush. You never know what will happen if you follow your mad flights of fancy (er ‘Mickey in the Night Kitchen’, anyone?). But if you don’t believe in your work, nobody else will.
Plus it’s GOOD to remind ourselves this is a business. If your book isn’t taken, that might not be about the quality of your writing. It might be simply that your book doesn’t fit today’s market. The upside of being in the fashion industry is that it can change and things that are not trendy now might be in the future. So write your thing, send it out and keep calm if nobody wants it now. They might want it later.
What are the other options?
If I really wanted to write whatever I like, there are of course other approaches. I could try self-publishing – but I don’t have the additional skillset I’d need for that. I’m not really interested doing the business/marketing/promo side. I just want to write.
I could get a ‘normal’ job and just write for fun. But one of the reasons I write is for connection. It’s strange that I’m happy with hardly anyone seeing my paintings but if I wrote books that nobody read, that would feel like less of an achievement. Maybe it’s just me, but I need readers in order to validate my work, and I need a mechanism by which my work can reach lots of readers – more readers than I would get by putting my work up on the net for free. So I’m stuck in the capitalist system of people buying my work = validation. (Now that I type that, it sounds shallow!) But I guess the industry of traditional publishing gives me a vehicle to reach more readers. And maybe looking for connection, readers, and recognition is actually a very human reason to write.
Still, there are definitely days when I want to give up all the commercial nonsense, open a little sweet shop and just make books for fun, writing exactly what I want to write, thank you very much.
Super useful thoughts, as always Abie.
I think the lofty way that writers and writing can be venerated is half of the problem. I have a tendency to obsess over getting the context right, to light the incense and to fall into seeing writing as some kind of transcendental dreamweaving rather than as an interesting and perfectly respectable way to make coin.
I am a much better teacher than I am a writer, but I don't walk into every workshop with children thinking 'How will I make my lasting mark on every child's life in the next forty minutes?' - I now simply go into my habitual autopilot of attunement to the kids, and let the interesting chatter take over.
Essentially, I just want my writing process to feel the same as my teaching process does. Habit, attunement, chatter.
Currently, when I pick up a pen, I feel an imagined Alan Garner hovering beside me, growling into my ear 'Come on then, if you think you can be as good as me - try it, worm. Make your mark, let's see what you've got.'
There is such a tension between this isn't there? Writing what you want to and trying to make a living from it. PS. Your books look amazing all together on the shelves!