On Pride, Capitalism, and Creativity

Arming the creative spirit for battle

Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash

It’s so hard writing a book—a newborn baby of a first draft of a book—knowing it is going to have to go out there and compete in the most un-meritocratic of marketplaces. It’s going to have to compete against books that ping every dopamine sensor they can possibly find. That have foiled covers, and sprayed edges, and tables in bookstores all to themselves, and gigantic fucking marketing budgets, regardless of whether they are actually any good or not. It’s going to have to go out in the market and compete against books that are the Chosen Ones, anointed by publishing executives or celebrities as “the book you should read” and therefore given—again—gigantic fucking marketing budgets and special stickers and tables and special editions that come out in boxes with swag and are shipped directly to your door. My book, the one I am slowly laboring to make beautiful and right, is going to have to compete against the latest ghostwritten offering of some big-name author that millions of people will buy regardless of—again—whether the book is actually any good.

It's hard to sit down in a room, in the quiet, by myself, and write while thinking about all those things. It makes me second guess every decision, everything, from the whole premise to which words I choose for a single sentence.

It is terribly difficult to balance writing from my heart—work that gives my days and hours meaning—with writing something I think my agent will support and be able to sell. And I want to achieve that balance, because while the act of writing itself is part of what gives my life meaning, it isn’t the whole thing. If the act of writing didn’t feed me in some way, I wouldn’t do it. I would give it up right this second. But I also want my writing to reach readers. Now that I have done that a couple of times, having published two books, I know it’s part of a whole: a process that begins as the faintest, foggiest glow in my mind and ends in a feeling that reaches a person I will never meet in a place I will never go because it traveled through something I wrote. That’s the whole. That’s the magic. That’s the thing I crave and work toward. It isn’t enough to write something that satisfies my taste but lives only on my laptop or in the minds of a few friends and my husband. I want the other half of the whole: readers.

So I must engage in this market, as little as I like it, and as little as I understand it, which is almost not at all. I crave certainty, or at least likelihood, in a marketplace where there is none. I must accept that what I’m writing will not only become a book, but it will become a product. And I must steel myself for battle in a way. (When I am struggling, I think that the greatest likelihood is to drown in a sea of mediocrity. Do I sound stuck up? So be it. I have read so many mediocre books.) I must don armor that protects my creative spirit, my ability to work, and my pride.

Yes, pride.

Pride drives me to write work that ultimately gives me satisfaction. It’s not the source of the work, but it is the engine that moves it forward. It is my pride—my belief that I am special, that I have something unique and necessary to say, and that I have the ability to say it in a way that can reach through the chatter to a reader who needs it—that gives me fuel to do the work.

I recognize that this is its own form of creative heresy. Such a dirty word: pride. It goes against the ideal of the vulnerable, tender artist, making art in a big bad world, driven by some inner force, or channeling some external muse, only seeking to say the most perfect truth of their heart. It sounds so crass and of-this-world to say that I am driven by pride. But I want to make an important distinction: I don’t create from pride. I create from feeling. From the place where my mind and my body feel an emotion that is only there because the thing I’m writing created it. Joy, excitement, rage, sadness, whatever. I creat from a place that needs expression and can’t find it any other way.

But to get to my goal—a book that I love, that my agent will support, and that an editor will buy and people will read—I am driven by a sense of pride which say, I am good at this. I know that what I write is better than an awful lot of what’s out there on bookstore shelves. Better than bestsellers, better than celebrity book club picks and books of the month, better than the buzzy book that just got a Netflix special. I don’t think my work is better, I know it’s better. And if anything is going to give me the strength to fight that daily battle against comparison, self-doubt, jealousy, despair, bitterness and fatigue—if anything is going to keep me going, it’s pride.

So I’m going to put on the armor, and the armor is going to say, fuck that noise, you are good at this. It is going to cool the sting of seeing yet another mediocre book with a giant fucking marketing budget touted on endless repeat everywhere I go. It will protect me from the battering chaos of the marketplace. It will make a fortress around me, inside which I can relax. Inside which I can write.

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COMMENTS:

What do you do to protect your ability to do creative work in the face of a capitalist market for art? I’d love to hear in the comments. We need all the tools we can find!

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