I’m new to blogging and have been astonished at the number of writers’ sites offering advice to writers. It’s quite interesting to compare sites by visual artists. They’re much more engaged with putting their own work out there and describing their creative motivation and processes than in outright teaching of wannabe artists. They’re not consumed by the selling process. The difference being that painting, photography, sculpture, etc offer instant gratification… you create something and it’s there for all to see and appraise… and hopefully purchase. They don’t have to scale the hurdle of attracting an agent and a publisher before their work reaches the general public. No one expects them to be hung in a ‘proper’ gallery before they’re worth looking at and available for purchase. Artists can sell work at all levels. The purchasing public come with pockets in all sizes. But even the most dumbed down of writing has hurdles to scale before it reaches the reading public. There’s an investment of time involved in reading a manuscript, and it seems that only other writers understand this… so we pass bits of writing back and forth to each other in blogs and websites because any acknowledgement is better than none at all. And we jolly each other along in an effort to convince ourselves that what we’re doing is worthwhile, on a personal level, if nothing else.
Marketing is a very different skill from writing and quite at odds with the creative process. And now, I think I’m going off to do some painting. I can hang them along my garden fence.
