Something I noticed a lot of when I was in high school and college taking courses required courses on the arts such as English, music appreciation, drawing, world history, sociology, and that one stage management class I had to take to fill an art credit requirement, was the sheer number of teachers who were failed writers, artists, historians, and other creative types who went on to become professors simply to pay their bills.
Of course, some teachers were there purely because they liked working with students and molding young minds. I don’t want to encourage the stereotype that those who can’t do, teach. That’s the sort of thinking that drives qualified mentors away from teaching jobs, even when it’s what they want to do, out of fear they won’t be respected. But there were also a lot of people who fit the stereotype, and these were the teachers who were noticeably bitter at their situation and far less competent at teaching than the people who went into education purely because that’s what they wanted to do.
As I got older and went on to join writers’ groups, I noticed two distinct types of writers: those who wanted to write books that they believed their audiences wanted to read, and those who wanted to write books that were either only appealing to themselves, or were meant to push some sort of message. And it was the latter group that never really sold any books.
I will openly admit that I did not enjoy every book brought in by the other aspiring authors, even the ones written by people who just wanted to entertain their readers. That’s because they were usually not my particular cup of tea, or just didn’t line up with my tastes. I don’t enjoy a story that’s over-sexualized, or has one-dimensional characters, especially male characters who are functionally animated carboard cutouts and female characters who are little more than walking pairs of boobs. But I also know that there are people who do enjoy these books, and that these stories have other things they use to gather appeal. There are stories that focus more on plot than characters, use traditional settings with which readers are familiar and comfortable. Not everyone wants to read a book set in an environment that’s radically different from every other fantasy setting; they’re not all interested in exploring new things. That’s okay; people don’t have to like all the same things I do.
But what I also noticed was that a number of other writers would not settle for that. If a work had an element that some (or even just one) of the writers’ group members didn’t like, rather than accept that the book wasn’t being written for them, they would try to get the writer to change the story. Even if the changes would have been fundamentally devastating to their plot, or character arcs, or worldbuilding. This isn’t just a case where you cannot please everybody; these were people who believed that everyone needed to please them. In one writers’ group, which was notably smaller than any others I’d been to, a pair of such individuals demanded that I be thrown out of the group because they couldn’t stand my writing, and the fact that I had refused to make their corrections.
This goes a lot deeper than just writers’ groups, however. I’ve mentioned before that if your readers don’t like your work, either because it’s boring, or it’s too slow-paced, or because they can’t stand the characters’ flaws long enough to see them grow and move beyond them, that’s not because of any fault on the part of the readers. That’s a problem with the writing itself, and it’s not the reader (the customer) who is wrong.
A book is, essentially, a product. The readers are your customers. If they don’t want to buy your book, they shouldn’t have to. If they don’t want to use your product, it’s not because they’re ignorant plebians or tasteless, unwashed masses. It’s because your product doesn’t deliver to them anything they want, whether that’s to be entertained, learn some important lesson on how to deal with problems in their own lives, or something else. I don’t know of any other type of business in which the seller thinks that if customers don’t want what they have to sell, then there’s something wrong with the customer.
A subject that I will probably have to do another post upon in the future is the literary canon (those books you had to read in high school that were held up as “high art,” despite being dry, boring, and in some cases, incomprehensible). Teachers who were often failed artists would often demand that their students read books like this, even when the entire class throughout the lesson-plan reported that the books were boring, or even raised valid criticism about said books, like the protagonist of the Awakening being a sheltered, borderline sociopathic aristocrat complaining about patriarchy in a household where she never has to lift a finger. And in response, the teachers would dismiss their points, require the students to keep reading, and usually mention some nonsense about casting pearls before swine, or how art wasn’t couldn’t be judged objectively, but the books they liked were objectively good.
I’ve mentioned before that I write in part to create the stories I wished had been available when I was in high school looking for things to read, and also to give my cousins something they would want to read. But it was also to create things other people would want to read. And I think that anyone who wants to be a creator of some kind is either going to need the same mentality, or they’re going to fail.
