Found an interview with Lucius Shepard on the Bookslut site . Always had a residual tickle of curiosity about him, because he had the intelligence to like Alison's books. The featured quote, on the Bookslut page, also struck a resonance since I've been doing a lot of thinking about the money versus purpose and commercial versus meaningful thing myself, of late. Shepard's versions went:

"I just was confused and I wasn?t liking what I was writing. Now I think I have some expectations that were engendered during my gap. I know what I want to write. I know what I like."

The difference is that I have always known what I wanted to write, but having finally hit a wall in terms of how far I'll go to make it commercial, I have more confidence about being productive about it and drawing satisifaction from it again in the "old"--pre-publication--way. Mind you, I am sure that the experience of making myself intelligible to a wider audience has been a good one on the craft end of things, and it always helps to learn what is or isn't "getting through" to people. But without some core values and confidence about what they mean to you, it can do more harm than good to one's closet-reared muse to be duking it out with the pressures of the commercial world.

Anyway, now I have discovered places on the web where writers like Lucius--who are not market-whipped--shamelessly express their opinions, I will be less inclined to feel rebellious and depressed by my next dose of the "worlds of no" lectures one gets at the writers events at sci fi cons, of late.

By "worlds of no" I mean the sort of spiel by a published writer that exalts the horrors of the slush pile, stomps on anything subtle or intelligent on the grounds that it is bound to lose the average reader, and just basically sends out the message that getting published is hopeless--except for intrepid and talented folks like themselves and anyone else willing to sell out whatever ideas they started with and submit to being 100% market whipped. The bottom line in that message amounts to moral and artistic bankrupcy for all that I can make of it. There's fighting for accessibility and quality in your work, and there's selling out for fantasies of fame and riches.

I am not claiming to equate my own attitude to writing with that of Lucius. He says he is "... a connoisseur of desolation" (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2004_12_003799.php) for starters, and I'm into those thin rays of hope and the small glories of the well-balanced human spirit. But I do feel much more admiration for someone like Lucius Shepard who writes, first and foremost, because he has things he needs to say, than I do for people who start and end their conversations about writing with a pork-belly trader's eye on what's hot at the checkout counter.

The market-whipped writers already get the goodies in cash rewards. Why can't they leave those of us who still have an ideal or two left, to pursue our foolishness in dignity, instead of trying to relegate us to the slush pile with a firm hand?

Could it be, maybe, that they're worried it might be coming back into fashion to have something to say, and to write with integrity? Maybe even about--horrors!--complex issues.

posted by Lynda at 14:34   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments