Hi Sam!
By: Mark Vanderpool
Tags: Médium, Writing Tips, Writing Advice

Hi Sam!

If by chance you are responding to my specific commentary on being “conscious consumers of the art created by others,” I was not thinking in particular about article length or Medium or even about blogging.

I was thinking more in terms of the books I spend time with and the publishing trends I reinforce when I purchase one.

There are a number of reasons I would most often rather purchase literary fiction from an unknown author whose excellent book will never have a sequel, rather than reinforcing a mega-brand like James Patterson.

No disrespect intended to commercially successful authors. None. I don’t throw around terms like “hack” to disparage anyone who makes a living in mainstream fiction.

We have inherited a false dichotomy between high art and popular art.

I despise the term “sellout” when used loosely and categorically to disparage just anyone who makes it. Thinking like that is a kind of poison.

There is nothing simple or sinful about turning out a popular series that won’t be critically acclaimed.

A person who becomes a millionaire writing books that sell in airport bookstores, books that get dubbed “beach reads” or “guilty pleasures,” and books never likely to become assigned reading in any college class, that author has still done something impressive, demanding, requiring of discipline, and well beyond the skill set of the average person.

And the corollary. Laboring in complete obscurity and producing a handful of books that never see a large audience does not mean, de facto, that you are a genius of uncompromising standards who will be celebrated posthumously.

Broad caricatures for different kinds of writers put aside, I think we all want to make something we care about which is also valued by an appreciative audience.

Preferably, by a large and appreciative audience. And for most of us, we would like to make art that is good enough for a paying audience.

Let the person who can’t pay for my book find it in a public library, but please, let there be enough commercial demand for what I create to make my passion into a viable career. There are only so many hours in the day.

Consumption here is just the operative term for the buying end in a society that operates within the paradigms of consumer capitalism.

It is impossible to live well in such a society if you are not producing something that others consume and producing it at a marketable level of quality. This is true even if your product is something intangible, like violin lessons at a school for the arts.

ALL of this applies to short-form writing, as well, including writing that happens on this digital frontier.

If you’re doing it for both love and money — not just one or the other —

Then:

1. Your writing is both an art form and a consumable good.

2. You will encounter tensions between your own creative impulses and what the market seems to demand.

Be skeptical of orthodoxies propounded by people who write nothing other than how-to advice.

If you want to go long, go long. If you want to sing out, sing out.

Most writing in the genre of “How to succeed on Medium” is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.

Even when it’s original, it’s a species of nonfiction writing built on hasty generalizations, insufficient testing, and confirmation bias.

Anything true in this genre is subject to change within a matter of weeks, rather than months or years.

Meanwhile, writing that both pleases your soul and serves an audience is built on fundamentals that never change.