Roundtable: Commercial Writing

Jeffrey Ford

I think to write with the desire in mind of “breaking out” is a dubious pursuit that will lead one down a dark path from which there is no return. Although sometimes, writing your own personal vision and ignoring all market trends can lead you by another byway that lands you on the same dark path. My goal has never been to “break out” but to write the fiction I have it in me to write and try to get it published.  Trying to game the marketplace seems like too much work to me, and although I wouldn’t mind making more money, it’s not something I’m ever likely to be interested in pursuing. I can judge by my relative obscurity — so far so good.  For those who are interested in pursuing this, I wish them the best. I’m sure it’s possible to write a very popular book that is a great book, but usually with these it seems they are great first and become popular by word of mouth — reviewer to reader, reader to reader.

James Patrick Kelly

As usual, Jeff says what was on my mind — and very well indeed.   We write what we have to write.  And I mean “have” in two senses of the word:  we write what we “must” write and we write what we “have available to us.”  By what is available not only I mean what we know or can imagine, but also what might be published.  And here is where we circle back around to the breakout question.  I agree that it is dubious proposition that a cynic can throw together all the elements that are said to be necessary to the breakout book and have it succeed in the marketplace.   You might stumble into a breakout, as Jeff says, or maybe it is in your writerly DNA that you must write breakout style books.

But what of the nudges that life or the market give the rest of us? Somebody is editing an anthology of retold fairy tales or ecotopia stories or singularity stories (like I am!).  Maybe you might never have thought to write one of these but the editor approaches you at a con and puts the strong arm on you for one.  Or maybe your agent tells you that she could sell a dystopian YA novel in a New York minute and, ~by god~, an idea for one pops into your head out of nowhere and you are very jazzed to write it. Or maybe you couldn’t sell the second book of your trilogy.  Do you then postpone work on the third even though it’s what you ~have~ to write?  I guess my question is, are these betrayals of talent?  If not, is tweaking the work to appeal to a wider audience wrong?  And if not, then how much tweaking is permissible?

Guy Gavriel Kay

Much as I’d LIKE to agree, I think part of Jim’s point kind of subverts the idealism of the lead part.  If it is ‘writerly DNA’ for some to be opportunistic … then that’s a writing type, no? And we’ve had examples cited of authors who started ‘text driven’ and succeeded with it, and so learned where to find more butter for their bread. Or authors who tried to branch and expand and were driven back by the market. Frank Herbert’s White Plague pushed him back to Dune, etc. (Is that fair, Gardner, et al? It feels like a good example but may not be. There are others.)

On the other hand, I do agree with the ‘what is available to us’ … that’s what I was trying to suggest with my line about the commonplace book note, a few posts back. (‘Write exquisite prose!’) One very good friend, older and wise, has noted that it is almost as hard to write beneath oneself as above. He means that this ‘sincerity’ gap can be intuited by readers, if an author is pandering too obviously. I take his point, but also slightly dissent: this, too, can be a skillset. Jeffrey Archer may have been cynical as all hell (how do I get solvent in a hurry after jail … write a political bestseller!) but it worked, certainly, for his market and his own purposes.* There are others, some within the genre. One very well known editor, in her own idealistic days, made a passionate Worldcon speech about an even better known author (now) abandoning his ‘true’ fictional voice and gift (as she saw them) to write a cynically commercial book – which succeeded, or I wouldn’t have been able to say ‘even better known’.

So I fear I can’t buy in to the ‘cynicism or market calculation doesn’t work’ idea. Not once we admit that for some this IS their gift. (It doesn’t imply the absence of other gifts, by the way, or even real talent. It is just an added talent … for knowing or anticipating what the zeitgeist wants.)

I also agree with Jim’s second paragraph … sometimes external forces (agent, editor, banker iPad lust!) steer someone to saying ’What if I tried this thing that everyone’s buying?’ I would never, to answer the last question, use words like ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ about this. I wouldn’t even say ‘betrayal of talent’, myself. I might regret the stronger work that never happened, say because someone became too prolific, or too deliberately glib (if they have more in them) but that’s personal, and about what I want, not about a failure on their part.

* This is the elephant in the parlour (or parlor, even): we haven’t really discussed ‘purpose’ fully, have we? Do we want to pay the mortgage, have con groupies, have a writing career not a day job (Steph Swainston on this?), be centred in pop culture, be driven by the integrity of the work not the market, write something that will endure as art? A continuum here, for me, not an either/or.

Tim Pratt

I’d argue that there’s a difference between being cynical about the market and being canny about the market. For example: I recently had three ideas for novels I wanted to write. One: a lyrical contemporary fantasy, probably not particularly commercial. Two: a sort-of epic fantasy with a very odd narrative structure and rather brutal anti-destiny underpinnings (think an epic in a universe with underpinnings that are more Lovecraftian than Tolkienian). And one of what Powers/Blaylock/Jeter might have called “gonzo historical” novels, set in the Victorian era with some weird SF elements.

After talking with my agent, I did a proposal for the gonzo-historical — because we could plausibly say “steampunk” in the proposal, and steampunk is selling lately. We did indeed sell that proposal, and I’m prepared for people to say I jumped on the steampunk bandwagon… but that’s only true in that, insofar as I had several ideas that intrigued me more or less equally, I picked the one that seemed most likely to sell. Is that cynicism? It doesn’t feel like it from where I sit, though I guess some might think so.