This post was mentioned on Twitter by grazitweets: Reading: Rethinking Your Novel: The Quest for Art vs. The Quest for a Publisher http://storyfix.com/?p=2364...

A friend and I were having this discussion just the other day.

Needless to say, we never reached any kind of agreement.

However, you put it in a way that I can accept, even if I’d tweak a few things or clarify others.

Take Care,
Chris

Communication is a science. Cause, distance and effect with duplication at the other end. That’s nuts and bolts. That’s the majority of the Six Core Competencies.

How much technology (science) does art need? Enough to convey that powerful emotional experience. The virtuoso has so much effortless (it seems) technique that it appears invisible; the emotion simply shines through.

If you’re writing for yourself, that’s totally fine. I do that a lot — cheat sheets, password lists, directions to my boss on how to find google.com, etc. Not much emotion there since the audience is knowingly limited.

You’ve seen the guys on the street (Times Square, downtown Hollywood) talking to them selves. Not commercially viable at all. I suppose you could call that art if they’re creating everything out of the thin air.

On the other hand, just by reading this blog, it means you, the writer, are interested in giving someone else an emotional experience — even better, quite a few emotional experiences throughout your story.

Write to sell. Write to your audience. If an “artist” isn’t commercially viable, he’s doing something fundamentally wrong. Either the quality of communication is insufficient (probably one or more of the Six Core Competencies is weak, the concept is not sufficiently high — part of that is artistic — or perhaps even the basic grammar or usage is out to lunch), or the emotion isn’t there to deliver.

Technique sufficient to deliver the emotion. Someone giving a speech might rant, rave or what have you — there’s emotion there, but if he hasn’t delivered an understandable communication resulting in an emotion, his audience will wander away thinking Times Square/Hollywood is really strange.

Kelly Diels doesn’t pull any punches. She delivers thought/communication expertly (technique) and you always come away with an emotional impact. A blog post might be a sentence; you still experience some emotion, even if it’s a little grin.

Now, whether or not a writer/artist can actually sell his product might be a different issue — marketing, promotion, and what have you.

But, if it isn’t viable in the first place (Six Core Competencies again) all the marketing and promotion will shortly fail — unless you try the Big Lie route politicians have been using for years.

Write to communication that emotion you’ve found inside you. While you might not have panic attacks yourself, be able to show your character(s) having panic attacks and the reader’s heart will start pumping, his breathing will get a bit faster and he’ll come away with a “F*ing aye!”

Do that consistently and you’ll be viable. The rest might be a crap shoot, but at least you’ll be betting with something of value.

Go write something really good and make someone cry with happiness or grief. Then you can sell it. Otherwise, just write any old way and you can cry yourself to sleep every night.

It’s also garbage. If that’s art I have an alley full of it.

You can scream at the top of your lungs what you feel and call it singing. Simon Cowell will say “that was absolute rubbish.”

But here, we want more. We labor over a single sentence among thousands of sentences. It’s no less expression or art than the spontaneous, primal rantings of a coffee house philosopher with a bongo drum (replace the bongo drum with a bass drum, snare and cymbal and it’s called comedy- “The government is God without a soul” ba-doom-ching). It’s just that it might end up being the least bit intelligible and that’s kind of the point with writing our stories isn’t it? To convey meaning that’s understood and profound. And, I’ve heard this too- Vicarious.

Who’d have thought the process of good writing would be so close to the directions on shampoo bottles.

A Kelly Diels-ism worth passing on, I think. Found in, ” Why I Write About Sex…”

The first time I had sex, I said, Let’s do that AGAIN!
So we did. And then I wondered, like many a teen heroine before and after me, how does anyone have time to do anything else???

Now, that’s how you write a sex scene.

Rethink.

Write.

Repeat.

You could have posted these as a poetic post in their own right, Larry. I’m a total advocate for the first two. So many posts about doing, doing, doing, and not enough about being still enough to let the inspiration land. Most books and films crash because folk don’t spend enough time dreaming and wondering, before capturing the idea that’s inspired enough to hold art and craft together.

(By the way, it’s my blog’s birthday today, and there’s an old post about writing there you may like.)