Commerce

How often have we been tempted by insufficient recognition, family pressures, or sheer economic desperation to throw in the literary towel and try to write for cash? “I’ll copy the latest bestseller, or crank out a Harlequin Romance, or whip up a hundred and fifty pages of bleak adolescent realism,” our dispirited ego mutters. “I’ll prove I don’t even need grants. The library’s full of how-to guides. Just learn the formula, add a dash of imagination, and concoct a book.  At the rate of two chapters a week....” Visions of affluent commercial publishers, fat contracts in hand, dance luridly in our heads.

No doubt a chorus of bestseller, romance, and children’s authors will roar, “It’s not that easy!” Nevertheless, between commercial and literary writing there is an important difference. The former may follow a tested pattern to appeal to a predetermined market segment: which slant, what age group, how many thousand words, at what reading level, number of chapters, to what deadline, etc. A literary writer is less sure before starting, if aware at all, what s/he is going to put down on paper. The work is a discovery, an exploration pursued (although certainly not devoid of hope of touching someone, somewhere) for its own sake, because somehow it matters, for reasons other than money. As all who have plodded this long and stony road know, literary writing is a lonesome, often unrewarded, but noble occupation. As Erica Jong was quoted earlier, it’s a search “for your own kind of truth”.