Colm Toibin, interviewed for Transmission issue #10, says:

'It's really important for artists of all kinds never to think about commerce when planning or executing a work. The life of the mind, and of the imagination, has to be pure.'

I wonder what WW members think of this?

Sheila

Okay if you can afford not to have a day job, I suppose. For most of us earning a living is a necessity, and so writing has to either produce enough for us to live on, or be something we do as well as work.

I do find his use of the word 'pure' a bit suspect: if you've had any kind of life your mind can't possibly be 'pure' in the 'unadultered' sense he seems to be using.

I understood it to mean uninfluenced by commercial interests - making a sex scene more graphic, for instnace, because an editor insists.

I don't know this author, but he seems to move around quite a lot with no visible means of support.(envious sigh)

Sheila

For most of us earning a living is a necessity, and so writing has to either produce enough for us to live on, or be something we do as well as work.

True - though there are all the writing-related ways of earning a living, which is presumably what Toibin lives on, like the rest of us, to make up the gap between our advances/royalties and what it costs us to live.

I don't think, though, that earning a living and refusing to think commercially are mutually exclusive. If you're lucky, what your mind does purely is something people want to read. If there is any luck in making the breakthrough to a writing career, it's this: that what you write naturally and best - most purely, if you like - is something that sells.

Emma

Yes, that sounds as if it makes sense, but stories abound concerning problems that writers such as DH Lawrence, James Joyce and others had getting published. Great writers both, but their views didn't fit with the establishment. I don't think either earned enough to live on. My daughter managed to get a whole PhD out of the tussles Shelley had with his publishers at an earlier date. We recently discussed on this forum the role of gender in publishing success.I'm reminded of Mary Shelley in this context. In my view it's not so much the reading public as the gatekeeping publishers who cause the headaches. A writer at a book-launch I attended last week said the main censorship she faced was from commercialism.

Having said that, I imagine Colm Toibin is properly rewarded for the fascinating article he writes in this week's London Review of books - all about upper class characters in works by Henry James, Wilde et al leading double lives, and the tension between disguise and revelation.They want to cheat on their wives, or be gay, but they equally want to let people know. It's called The Art of being Found Out and it's in pages 24 to 27 of the 20th March issue but I can't find it on google. However, I did see the theme is related to his new book, which is not mentioned in LRB for some reason. Strange how you notice names after they crop up once. There's a theme-related short-story by Hilary Mantel immediately following.

Sorry, if I seem to have rambled off the subject, but it's really quite closely connected, in my view.

Sheila

I find his comments a little suspect, Sheila, since no-one can put out an un-edited manuscript, and if you use an editor and maybe readers, prior to publication, then the end result can never be the author's 'pure' work.
If, however, his is talking about writing literary fiction and avoiding the commercial side of genre fiction, then I suppose he has a point, albeit poorly made. But it is an old argument - how far do you go to preserve your artistic integrity.
Personally I have no integrity and would be happy to make any changes required to maximise the readership of my work.


- NaomiM

<Added>

However, coming back to this after my comment on the Endings thread, I can see that he may be referring to the purity of the story. Start writing without preconceptions and the pure storyline emerges, the one that wants to be told. If however, the author thinks that s/he is control of it, that is pure conceit.

<Added>

But there's nothing wrong with a story that wants to be a James Patteson or a Jilly Cooper.

<Added>

Ok, I'm really going to have to lay off the Jasper Ffordes.

Well, I think you do have to tailor your stories to the readership to an extent, hence my current attempt to write a story where the mc lives in a village. I agree, too, with what Emma says about a style or genre you write best. I'm still testing to find one that suits.

I agree the ending should be not quite what the reader expects, either. That's a weakness of the Hilary Mantel story - it's fairly obvious what's going to happen and it goes on too long after the denousement.

Your story sounds very inventive, Naomi. I love Aztecs since I saw that exhibition a few years back at the RA, also the Mel Gibson film and DH Lawrence's Plumed Serpent. Yes, I wrote my first novel in a meandering fashion, even incorporating a bits of plot suggested by a teaching colleague who was a writer. He said 'When in doubt, start a fire.' So I did, and never looked back. I don't mean I burnt the manuscript, either. I must look into this Jasper Fforde if he's so inspirational.

Sheila

Toibin is a very well established and highly regarded writer (regular contributor to the LRB, etc. - btw, Sheila, I don't think that you can access articles online unless you're a subscriber), so he's certainly well-positioned to make such statements!

But I do think he has a point - there's no point writing something simply because you think it will sell, if it's not the book that you're desperate to write. I think that editors are probably quite savvy to contrived attempts at bestsellerdom, so that strategy is unlikely to get you very far, anyway.

Yes, I think you're absolutely right - it's not just Mills & Boon editors who can tell a mile off if something's been written as a cynical exercise in ticking the commercial boxes, rather from passion. I think the people who write highly commercial fiction best are the ones for who it is what they're burning to write - and why not? I'd love to be able to write detective fiction of the kind I love - Sue Grafton, Val McDermid - but I can't.

I also think that, in a sort of parallel to Toibin's determined high art stance, there's an inverted snobbery among commercial writers and their readers: 'I just write what sells, no high-falutin' fancy-pants up-its-own-arse nonsense about my stuff.' Which can be true, but is also often defensive against the way high-art purism can so easily slide into high-art snobbery, even the author's/reader's own which they can't quite shed.

For example, Heyer suffered from it badly: she worked incredibly hard and seriously, cared passionately about craft and technique and research, wrote the masterpieces of the genre she invented, but as the critical reaction to her work became more and more dismissive, she took to dismissing herself as 'a scribbler of trivial romances'.

Emma

I think you just have to write the book that you want to write, enjoy the process and only then worry about the business side of things.

Somehow, my posting crossed with nessie's. So here goes again.

Naomi, I do subscribe to LRB. Would it be legal to copy the article and post it here?

Emma, to take your point about books :

written as a cynical exercise in ticking the commercial boxes, rather from passion.

there's an apropos article in today's G2 called How to spend a life turning your life into a book with before and after pics of the woman who dressd up as a man for a year.

It certainly caught my attention, as someone who's about to market a book about working in China for a year!


Sheila

Thinking about this and about a lot of similar debates one finds on writing forums, I'm struck by how often things are presented as binary oppositions when reality is never that clear cut and is usually much messier.

Why does it have to be presented as 'sell-out' commercialism versus 'pure' art? I would have thought most writers combine the two to varying degrees: even the most 'pure' artist surely hopes to gain something, even if it's recognition from a limited audience as opposed to an income.

Then we have the plotting versus non-plotting debates, the rules versus non-rules arguments, etc. I don't think any of those kinds of issue are either/or matters, and presenting them that way is to grossly over-simplify.

Emma, I do agree with you: I hate it when people make 'literary writing is up its own arse, pretentious twaddle' comments, as it simply makes the comment writer sound up their own backside, IMO.

people make 'literary writing is up its own arse, pretentious twaddle' comments, as it simply makes the comment writer sound up their own backside, IMO.

Yes, it's still snobbery, just of the inverted kind. I frequently don't 'get' literary fiction, but I usually assume that it's as much my blind spot as the writer's failure: we're a bad fit for each other, that's all.

There is such a thing as cynically ticking the literary boxes, I suspect, too: not 'I'll do what sells and will make tons of money' but 'I'll do what looks lit'ry and will win me prizes. But just as an editor can tell when you've written your junk-for-the-masses romance in pure cynicism, I think one can sometimes tell when someone's writing to sound clever. What really, really annoys me, though, as you say Daisy, is when people talk as if any book they don't get has been written cynically to sound clever. My experience of super-literary writers, such as it is, is that they, too, write honestly for what they are, and why shouldn't they?

Emma

'I'll do what looks lit'ry and will win me prizes.

- Banville admitted (only half in jest) that he had written his Man Booker prize winning novel specifically with that aim in mind.

<Added>

In fact, I got the impression that it wasn't until he had won that prize that he felt he could finally relax and get on with writing just for the fun of it (hence his crime novels under his Black pen name)

My editor, who's won a literary prize or two herself for her fiction, said she lost all faith in prizes when Banville won the Booker... I've not read it, so I couldn't possibly comment.

With authors who write under two names we assume that the lit'ry one is where their heart is, and the others are to pay the rent. But going about it as cynically as that (if it's true and he's not just trailing his coat) makes me wonder if it could be the other way round: the approval of the high-minded is the thing they chase cynically, and the fun-and-popular is what they really enjoy. But let's not be binary about it (you're so right, Daisy), it's probably a matter of enjoying both in different ways. I'm sometimes tempted to try writing something so completely different, that it'd have to be under another name. I just need another life to do it in...

Emma