I've maintained for a long, long time that any communication is a transaction. My own frame of reference, which should come as no surprise, is art and literature: an essential component of any artistic endeavor is the audience. That's one reason I refuse to do "artist's statements." It's cheating the audience, in a way, and cheating the artist: part of being an audience is bringing your own outlook and experience to the interaction, and an attempt on the part of the artist to direct that is not fair. (For an illuminating take on the relationship between artist and audience, see this post by Jan Suzukawa, entitled "In Defense of Fan Fiction." She writes about this toward the end of the post, and she hits it right on the head.
So, lo and behold! It's a take that's finally showing up at The Daily Dish.
By way of that post, this, from Steven Pressfield:
It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.
Nobody wants to read your shit.
There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.
They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.
What’s your answer to that?
1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.
2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.
3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.
When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.
Granted, artists have an advantage there: people are looking at, listening to, or reading their shit because they want to. We still have to fight for attention, so it has to be arresting, intriguing, interesting, and worth their while. Ben Casnocha points out a fundamental truth, cast in terms of blogging:
One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers' attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.
This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you'll likely lose the reader's attention. They click to a new page.
It's brutal. It makes you better.
He's right, but it applies across the board. As far as my own writing skills go, let me tell you a story: I once had an intern who said he wanted to be a writer, and what should he do? I said, "Go out and live for about ten years. And then try to get work writing anything and everything for anyone who will pay you for it. And do it -- meet your deadlines, don't play prima donna, no existential angst, just churn out the best stuff you can, or better. Read everything you can -- there are lessons there, too. And after a few years of that, you're ready to write your own stuff."
There's a truism that I'm sure came from someone famous whose name I've forogtten, but it's basic and very, very true: you can achieve anything, but the essential element is "practice, practice, practice."
That's what I did. I'm told I'm not a bad writer.
But back to audiences.
I don't know where the idea got started that an artist doesn't need an audience, but it's out there. It's probably another one of those weird takes we got from the Romantics -- you know, the misunderstood genius, like Beethoven (who, as it happens, was highly regarded in his day). There is, in this day and age, a countervailing idea, especially prevalent among those who work in genre fiction: the contract with the reader. I think that's another one that carries over to other modes and mediums, as well. In essence, it's simply that the audience has certain expectations, and the artist has, in some degree at least, to meet those expectations if he hopes to grab his audience. If he's going to flout them, he has to do it in a way that makes sense. He cannot, however, ignore them.
This has its downside, of course -- the temptation to produce something strictly according to formula is overwhelming, or nearly so. It's something we see in books in particular, as the competition gets stiffer and the economics get more and more touchy: everyone needs a best-seller in their catalogue, and the more the merrier. By the same token, getting the attention of a publisher (dealer, performer, what have you) is also harder and harder, because they all want something they know will sell.
The initial post in Sullivan's little mini-series was a comment by one of his readers about self-publishing, which many see as a way around the "establishment."
For years I'd told myself if I couldn't get someone else to publish my writing I wouldn't go the vanity press route. After coming so close (and promising the thing to friends) I decided to go ahead and self-publish (I used createspace). What with blogs, twitter, and all the self-publishing vehicles available, it's ridiculously easy to publish crap.
Somewhere in all that crap is the best crap no one's ever read.
The biggest upshot of the self-publishing revolution is the greater likelihood of people finding the crap that means something to them rather than having experts tell them what crap should mean something to them. To survive, the publishing industry needs to figure out how to make money in that environment because there are tens of thousands of individuals working on the same problem and nowadays the gap between Random House and chuckleheads like me has never been narrower.
Well, yes, but. . . .
The publishing industry has a couple of big points in its favor -- start with a marketing apparatus that a self-published author can't match -- publicity, book tours, connections to retail outlets, to reviewers, the works. And there is another, very important element that a lot of people don't like to talk about: artistic judgment and expertise. That moves us into that scary area of art known as "quality." Editors at major publishing houses, successful art dealers and theatrical producers, bands and orchestras know what's going to catch on (as well as anyone can, anyway), but they also know what's good. (Not always -- I have a string of mercilessly savage reviews to my credit because of that, and I'm a pretty merciful guy.) Let me just say this: why does anyone think that an audience wants to be bothered with crap? And one of the things they can do is identify crap.
So, rather than meander on for the rest of the day, let me summarize: the artist needs an audience, because art, like any other effort at communication, is a two-way street. Each brings something to the transaction. The artist has to grab the audience and hold them; the audience has to grant the artist the space to make his point. (For a book, I generally figure the first fifty pages are going to do it. If you don't have me by then, forget it.) We have industries that connect artist and audience. We also now have means to make those connections on our own -- but you still have to get their attention. And to do that, you've got to have spent at least a portion of your life honing your skills and filling your toolbox.
End of homily.
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