Absolutely fascinating article here:

http://www.bksp.org/secondarypages/hendlin/003.htm

about how to find a fit between what you want to write and what you might be able to sell.

It's part of Backspace, a website for serious writers which is new to me (though not necessarily to other WWers, but one I'll certainly be dropping into:

BackSpace

Emma

Thanks, Emma - it certainly was fascinating. Perceptive, too, about great artists of whatever persuasion having to work to order for a patron - I am musing that this can either have disastrous results, such as the various Poet Laureates' largely laboured and fawning odes churned out through gritted teeth to their monarch, or triumphantly inspired ones where a composer, for example, turned the requirements of the contract into his own expression of genius - Handel's the one that sprang first to my mind.

I am just about to read the further link at the bottom of that article - 'Dealing with Rejection Bitterness' - something I feel I may need very soon

I think that the article goes to the heart of what Pete and I were disagreeing about in the self-publishing thread; societies have never been prepared to support creative artists totally, without some control over what they create. So unless you're very lucky and happen naturally to want to write exactly what society wants to read, you're going to have to either starve, or find some way to make a fit between what society wants and what you do.

And yes, the rejection one's good too.

Emma

He makes some good practical points for example, getting published is not about pouring out your soul - it's about writing something people want to read. And if your writing is engaging and clever you can write about almost anything.

And I love the fact that he's a psychiatrist and writes a column called 'Shrink Rap'!

getting published is not about pouring out your soul - it's about writing something people want to read.

Yes. So many writers - maybe because we all begin by pouring out our souls - assume that the two are mutually exclusive, but of course they're not. It's all in how you write it.

Jane Austen started by writing much sharper satire, and her letters go on being like that, but she learned to shape her fiction to what would sell, and would any of us think that P&P was the worse for it?

Emma