A writing rant about selling out.

I don’t want to write the great American novel and now I don’t even think I want to write something that’s good enough to win any prize. I love the Anne Rice and Stephen King books but they’ve never won elite prizes for writing like Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel or a National Book Award. And those writers are my favorites because they tell good stories. They may not have the most poetic writing in the world, but god can they tell a good story. And that’s what I want to do; tell a good story and entertain my reader if only for just a few hours.

Maybe it’s a product of my lower class upbringing, but I have no pretensions like Jonathan Franzen. I’m a reverse snob. I don’t want my books in snotty bookstores where regular people are afraid to go in because the snotty book people treat you badly because of your writing taste. The best thing about a company like Amazon.com is you can indulge your own peculiar tastes in book and because it’s all anonymous without judgments, it’s the most democratic of all book shopping experiences.

I know all my friends, especially CF will hate my writing. CF never even liked my Art is Scary story even though JW loved it and everybody who saw me perform it loved it. She’s not very generous that way, which is sad. I am happy for her when she’s successful but she has never celebrated my success or told me any of my stories were any good. JW loved my stories and for his insight I will always be grateful.

CF is so quick to judge that Jane Campion sold out on the ending of the movie "The Piano, but I think that’s a judgment. I know I’ve said people have sold out but the more I look at being at artist, the more I think that art is a collaborative process and that one has to compromise to get one’s art in the world. And I’m starting to think that it’s not selling out and to say sell out is a elementary understanding of the business. I just know right, I’ll be accused of selling out. But you know, whatever. Those people who don’t want to sell out can spend the rest of their life resenting other people’s success and not having the time and energy to create their art.

I need to be commercially successful to buy my free time. And what is so wrong with masses and masses of people want to read my work? It just means that more people can relate to my work, which would so cool because that would mean you were in touch with how normal people think. I don’t think I’m normal so to write something that lots of other people like, normal people, would be so fun and great for me.

There’s nothing wrong with people’s attitude about selling out. I just think society has brainwashed everyone into thinking there’s something wrong with appealing to massive amounts of people. It’s society’s way of keeping the artist from creating and producing art; to denigrate successful artists. Art like theatre needs an audience to live, art produced to appeal for one or a few is not art but some self indulgent piece of art that only a few people will like. And that’s fine. But art that captures the imagination of a lot of people I’m beginning to think, is like tapping into the universality that exits in all of us. This tapping of the universal mind is what I think true art is about because it’s the most real, the most widely read and watched, because everyone that sees or reads it can relate.