WEDNESDAY, 14 JANUARY 2004
Money for free, creative writing? This literary project as part of the commercial marketplace? [See “The next steps in my life” (31/10/1998)]
My position can be summed up in two phrases: The Creative End Product and the Creative Process.
If commercial acceptability is the primary motivation during the creative process, the end product is not free expression. It’s a different matter altogether if commercial acceptability of the end product is not even considered during the creative process, but the end product still seems to have some commercial value.
If you as a writer are known to be critical of corporations, shameless profiteering, and the surrender of creative freedom at a “reasonable” price, what are you if you then turn around and submit your creative work to a corporation primarily interested in financial gain? Even more so when you submit it to an agent of this corporation who claims the right to make changes to your work in order to bring it more in line with the values of the corporate “sponsor”, and to make the product more enjoyable in their estimation, and therefore a potentially more profitable product.
It is ultimately about honesty. It’s about honouring the reputation you have established for yourself, in both word and deed.
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[Note: There are publishers – businesses that have to keep an eye on the bottom line for their survival – that regard certain literary material as more than just marketable products. It may be that these publishers serve a certain political agenda, and changes they suggest would simply make the final product more digestible to the potential reader; changes that would enhance the literary quality of the end product rather than water down the content or message in order to sell more copies. A case, thus, where the agenda of the publishing company is compatible with that of the writer for whom creative integrity is more important than financial success.]
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SATURDAY, 11 OCTOBER 2014
Today I read what David Bowie said about his 1983 album, Let’s Dance: “At the time, Let’s Dance was not mainstream. It was virtually a new kind of hybrid, using blues-rock guitar against a dance format. There wasn’t anything else that really quite sounded like that at the time. So it only seems commercial in hindsight because it sold so many [copies]. It was great in its way, but it put me in a real corner in that it fucked with my integrity.”
He continued by saying: “[It] was a good record, but it was only meant as a one-off project. I had every intention of continuing to do some unusual material after that. But the success of that record really forced me, in a way, to continue the beast. It was my own doing, of course, but I felt, after a few years, that I had gotten stuck.”
According to the article on Wikipedia, Bowie later reckoned that the success of the album led to him hitting a creative low that lasted for the next several years.
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