Live To Write Another Day by Dean Orion (free ebooks for android .txt) 📕

13. Art vs. Commerce

Many years ago, my wife and I were in Paris and visited the Musée d’Orsay, where we were lucky enough to catch an extraordinary Vincent van Gogh exhibit that had a very profound effect on me. It was a modest collection, only about fifteen or twenty paintings located in a very small room, so it wasn’t so much the volume of the work that made such an impression. It was the fact that they were all self-portraits.

I’m sure that putting the exhibit in a somewhat claustrophobic room was a very intentional decision on the part of the curator. You couldn’t help but feel an unbelievable rush of emotion the moment you walked in there. There he was, arguably one of the greatest artists who ever lived, staring at you from every direction, the sorrow in his eyes, the pain he suffered throughout his life so palpable. And to think that this incredibly gifted man went to his grave without ever having the satisfaction of knowing how immensely valuable his work would soon become. It’s hard to imagine a greater injustice.

I don’t bring this up to be a buzz killer again, but to simply illustrate the point that:

Financial success is one thing and artistic success is entirely another.

Van Gogh was clearly a brilliant painter, but the fact that he never achieved financial success in his lifetime obviously doesn’t diminish his artistic achievements in any way. The two are not joined at the hip. I think the same could be said of writers and writing. We’ve all heard the stories of the great Hollywood scripts that languished for years and years before someone finally championed them and made them into classic films, or the great authors who experienced financial hardship before achieving both critical acclaim and financial success. Believe it or not, for every Mario Puzo or J. K. Rowling that’s been lucky enough to break into the public consciousness, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of other writers who may not be rich and famous but whose work is truly exceptional, as well as worthy of being enjoyed by far more people than will ever have the pleasure of being exposed to it.

Furthermore, financial success is completely objective. You can touch financial success. You can literally count it and define it in terms of dollars and cents. It’s different for each individual of course, but it’s still the result of a concrete, mathematical formula. For some writers, it may simply mean getting paid any amount of money to write (i.e., financial success = receiving anything greater than zero for writing), while other writers may not consider themselves financially successful unless they make at least six figures a year from writing. Still, any way you slice it, financial success is a clear, tangible thing. Writing success, on the other hand, is entirely subjective. It’s something that no one can touch or count.

So all other things being equal, including talent level, why are some writers more financially successful than others?

This question has a two-part answer. First, achieving financial success isn’t really all that different for writers than it is for any given population of people in any other profession. There are just things some people do well that eventually results in more money in their wallets—the way they present themselves; the way they interact with their colleagues, their clients, and their associates; the way they're able to gather a supporting cast around them. This is all stuff you can learn. Sure, some of it’s instinctual, but for the most part it’s all about being good at the business of being a writer.

Second, as any successful businessman will tell you, sometimes you just have to be lucky. This, obviously, is not something you can learn. You have to be at the right place at the right time—and in the case of writers, with a well-executed idea.

Which brings us back to writing success.

 Writing Success = Writer Gene + Process

I always get a kick out of hearing people say that they wrote a feature-length screenplay in six days. I don’t know why it’s always six days and not five or seven, but for some reason it is. When people do this, they want you to think either (A) they’re some kind of genius, or (B) that they were so blessed by this moment of divine inspiration, the thing just came bursting fully grown out of their brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

The truth is that no one can write a screenplay in six days, not a good one anyway, and certainly not a great one. The only way to write anything great is to have both the talent to write it and the drive to spend as much time as it takes to make it the very best it can be. In other words, the formula for writing success is:

Writing Success = Writer Gene + Process

Achieving writing success is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s about continuing to hone your process so that each successive piece of work over the course of your writing life grows and improves over the last one. It’s about going deeper into all the aspects of the craft. It’s about developing your command of the language. It’s about being more efficient, learning from your mistakes, and becoming an expert in each and every medium that you choose to write in.

Most importantly, writing success is something that can only be measured by your own internal yardstick. Only you know what you’re capable of. Only you know how far you can push yourself, how many ideas you can come up with, how well you can execute them, and how many times you can rewrite that script over and over and over again. Writing success only happens when you can look yourself in the mirror and honestly say that you’ve done everything in your power to make a story work, that you’ve tuned that