Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Many of the greatest writers in history have "written for money": those dreadful hack writers Shakespeare and Dickens, to name but two. You make it sound as if there's something wrong with writers producing work that readers will want to read!
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I understand your stance, Harry, but I do believe that we're a long way from Dickens and Shakespeare now and it's a stretch trying to compare their situation with our situation now.
The question these examples illustrate is why do people write? We know, at least using Shakespeare as an example, that he copied most of his ideas from earlier works and then these works were performed. His (or her) status as a writer was secondary to performance, and performance not as art but as paid entertainment. But we've evolved from that state, and we're in an ongoing revolution of intent.
I know why I write, and it isn't money because I've never made a cent from what I've written. I write because I wake up with pictures in my head, memories cramming my nostrils and my skin crawling with ideas. I wake up remembering Spain and the shadow of a bull I saw on a hill, and the picture of a bullfight I saw hanging outside a shop during siesta time. I write because I saw Picasso painting on an old black and white film, and because Dali's face haunted at least one of my dreams as a child. This all happened just after dawn this morning when I put down a story called "On the Hill, A Bull" and it was down and captured by first light. Nobody paid me to write about Spain and failed revolutions and artists waiting for the death of a dictator so that they were free to paint again. I wrote, I write because I have to, there's not really any option and I only falter in my writing when I have to think about such abstracts as money and audience and copyrights.
So yes, some write for money, and there' s nothing ignoble about that pursuit. But you must acknowledge that some of us write because we have something to say, even if that something is only to remember the heat of Spain one summer a long time ago and the shape of a shadow of a bull on a hill in a country waiting for death.