I’ve had an epiphany of sorts lately, or at least a turn-about in my perspective that I would describe as radical. In short, I’ve embraced the effect of market forces on the arts, and on writing in particular. Heretofore, I’d stubbornly held onto the idea that writers were creating a private vision, nurturing a subtle relationship with an intimate muse. More to the point, I disparaged the market, oh cruel, unappreciative, capricious market, forcing writers to live and work in anonymity but with integrity. Something like that.

I certainly didn’t see the writer as a business person. Why should the writer, who must daily summon the courage to dredge her soul–and that of her neighbors–also worry about marketability, profitability, and spreading the word about a product so worthy as the book?

All this has changed, and more.

Think of Michelangelo. He didn’t wake up one day with a vision to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was no quirky artistic impulse, some sort of installation project. No–it was a commercial job, an assignment. Nonetheless, he created immortal art on the job, prone on scaffolding, painting the hand of God. People have lain on their backs for money and done worse.

Raymond Carver produced many a short story because he had a wife and kids and had to pay his rent in Chico, California. Do we wish he’d had the leisure to forgo that writing?

I’ve mentioned that I’m taking a marketing course, one that has integrity and even love writ into its principles. I’ve been studying how you think about what you do, how you talk about what you do, whom you serve, how what you do addresses the urgent needs and compelling desires of your clients. Then I’ve been thinking about how all of this business sense applies to fiction.

Are writers service professionals?

I pose this question and all my old objections surface: the originality and honesty of the writer must not be compromised by some sort of base grappling with supply and demand.

But Charles Dickens rewrote the ending to Great Expectations to please his editors and the audience of this serialized tale. Shakespeare stooped to greatness to garner a laugh from the rowdy crowd.

The parenting angle of this rant is this: I am solidly out of the self-centered musing and exploration of my solitary youth. Everything I do is in relationship. Demand and supply. Demand and supply. It’s humanizing. The expression “navel-gazing” itself might remind us that we were, each of us, nurtured into being from somebody else’s body. That very belly-button of solitude is the site of our first and most dependent inter-relationship.

What happens to a book when its author is concerned with attracting readers?

First, it means the characters must be fascinating, the plot enticing, the language compelling, the world drawn so that the reader is drawn in. None of this is bad for art. If we are modern-day Scheherazades, tale-telling to save our lives, our lives dependent on the continued interest of our listeners and their insatiable curiosity–fed by our craft–to know what will happen next, does this repel the intimate muse? Is she the sort who will not let you take her out in public? Who will not kiss you on the dance floor? Beware the finicky muse. She will not supply your bread and butter.

David Mamet said, “If you have something to fall back on, you will.” And yet by setting the writing to one side and the money-earning, world-facing self to another, we force ourselves to fall back on something else. The most prolific writers I know have a working-class work ethic. Work doesn’t surprise or offend them, and they understand that writing is work–making it and selling it.

A cousin of my great-grandfather invented the heating and cooling system for the Ford. My great-grandparents moved into a small apartment with this man and his wife, so that they could live inexpensively, and they all worked–my great-grandmother made hats and sold them door-to-door–so they could invest in the company that would make these heating and cooling systems. They became very rich, and it’s taken three or four generations to turn that fortune into the exhaust fumes of family bickering.

But what if the inventor of the heating and cooling system had felt that the effort of thinking of the thing was enough, was all that he could be expected to do? What if my great-grandmother made hats but did not want to sell them, wanted them to sell themselves by dint of their beauty and worth?

My communist, trust-funder grandmother may be rolling over in her newly minted grave as I extol the virtue of market forces on art, but if she’d been forced to complete her decades-long project, a screenplay about the Haymarket martyrs, the world would be a better and a richer place, both. If she’d been hungry not only in her soul but in her stomach, she’d have accomplished more.

It is a false luxury and a disservice to imagine that you do not have to peddle your wares if what you make is art. If you were making a better spark plug, you’d have a business plan. It’s time for writers to do the same.

One final note: perfectionism is the bane of really good writers, and market forces do a funny thing. They force you to get your best work out in front of people. They support greatness and push against perfectionism. This is a gift no writer can afford to turn down.

To be honest, I had barely read a blog before I got ready to start blogging myself. I was perhaps a bit suspicious of the medium. It’s true that ever since I was a child, with my first Hello, Kitty journal, I could not keep a diary without imagining a future reader. In fairness to the vanity of my young self, the diaries I was most familiar with were those that had been published–Anne Frank, for example. In any case, the blog circumvents the necessity of pretending you are writing for reasons of personal growth, even as you become most aware of your desire to grow, personally.

I have admired writers who are willing to grow in public. Michelle Tea is a wonderful example. She is prolific and talented and has written with a work ethic I envy and then gotten her work out to a growing public (via spoken word tours–the infamous Sister Spit–and publication) since she (and I) was quite young. This means that she’s gotten better, and broader, in front of that public.

Yesterday in the car, Angie played a part of a podcast for me in which the speaker made an important distinction between the natural, healthy dissatisfaction a writer or creator feels towards the work he or she has done and contempt for that work. There is slippage between the two, and contempt does no good, since it casts doubt on the worthiness of everything you do or might do. Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, will push you to stretch, to grow. To try something different. (Although the boys were not interested in (their or my) listening to the entire podcast, Angie tells me that it was from Accidental Creative, which seems like a great group.)

I considered publishing my daily writing of this NaNoWriMo novel that I’ve been working on for the past twelve days (not including today, yet) and which I will be writing for at least the next eighteen days. My idea was to post a sort of blog-style rough draft of this fictional story in installments, much as Dickens published Great Expectations and other of his novels. Then I remembered that I am not Dickens. Actually, I just thought that the pressure of writing a novel in thirty days might not withstand the additional pressure that the novel be readable.

Another part of me, though, longed for the tension, excitement and sheer storytelling demand an audience would create. Shahrazad had no time to erase her efforts and throw up her pages in despair. Shakespeare purportedly scribbled lines on some Elizabethan index cards and handed them to his actors. The ur-storyteller caveman had to create some serious questions in his listeners or risk being tossed out of the cave. And not just Plato’s cave.

In general, I have been guilty of revising for too long, if there is such a thing. I have let dissatisfaction slip into contempt. The problem is, of course, that with each new book (or draft), one learns more, one grows as a writer, and so that book inevitably becomes the product of a younger, less experienced (if also less despairing) writer. I think I made the same mistakes with having children–I waited nearly until the deadline had passed, wanting to get it right instead of merely to get it done. But with writing and children, I have learned that there is much to be said for getting it done as a path to getting it right.

Then, too, watching little people grow in public, it becomes clear to me that nothing can eclipse the brilliance of embracing wherever you are in the moment. I think of Charlie clapping his little hands together in self-approval when he shoots a basket or puts away a toy. I think of Leo’s pleasure in learning to say the “O” in E I E I ____. We delight in them when they can hold their heads up and then when they can play peek-a-boo and then when they can feed themselves a bite and then when they can walk and then when they can say an animal sound and then when they can make a joke and then when they can read a book . . . and they learn to delight in themselves, too. At one-and-a-half (or -quarter), no one is looking back and saying, “Hmmm, I didn’t used to be able to walk. What a loser. I should have stayed in until I knew more.”

Whatever its flaws, reality writing has a lot going for it over its fellows in television. I used to worry that people would stop leaving the kinds of informal, intimate written records that our parents and grandparents left–letters and diaries. Blogs are not the same, of course. But this is what I started out to say: I have become a convert. I read blogs now. At the end of the night, for instance, I check in on the progress of the cutest, bravest little guy and his amazing moms at Simon Lev, and I always read Amy Wilensky’s amazing entry at Seven Hundred Fifty Words. I am learning about organization and Serenity for the Self-Employed from Heather Boerner, about How Not to Write from Jamie Grove, and on and on . . . Words have always been my medium, and it is a great pleasure to find this living stream of them at this time when I am most house-bound.

I would love to know: what blogs do you read?