Friday, September 03, 2010
Why I don't write a book
The following bit of wisdom is courtesy of Dilbert creator and all-around brilliant thinker Scott Adams. (He uses some Google thing to show him every internet post that mentions him, so... hi Scott!! You're the MAN!!) Check this out:
"The Artist's Secret is that all art comes from abnormal brains. So if you create art that satisfies your own tastes, you have created for a market of exactly one abnormal person. If you're lucky, a handful of other freaks get some joy from your creations too. But it won't be enough to pay your bills. It's not a career until you learn to create products that normal people like."
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/comic_fail/
I'm a geek, and an Aspie, and, let's face it, abnormal. The only objectively decent writing I create (see my posts from 2007 and earlier, when I was posting serious essays) comes when it flows easily from me, and THAT only happens within my narrow and highly opinionated areas of interest; I can churn out grammatically correct sentences on any topic, just like YOU can, but it'd read like a high school assignment... people would pay to NOT read it.
I can't apply my "writing process" to socially-desirable content, because I don't HAVE a process.
I'm not even entirely sure what socially-desirable content IS; I literally have no idea what normal people want to read about, aside from obvious things like music I've never heard and movies I've never seen.
AND; I have no idea how to modulate how I word things so that the bulk of people don't recoil from what I write, any more than I can modulate what I say to keep from putting people off, which I clearly do no matter how polite, agreeable and friendly I am. It's an Aspie thing; somehow the "tone" is just "wrong" in a way no one can ever put a finger on if asked.
In a zone as big as the blogosphere, with its highly disproportionate % of eclectic thinkers, I managed to draw a pretty respectable audience. I'm betting that if I self-published a book and offered it for free, a fair # of them would read it. If they had to pay, there's a reasonable chance that a few die-hards would in fact ante up... and that's the "handful of other freaks" that Adams referred to. And that's as far as it would ever go... and that's why I don't write a book.
"The Artist's Secret is that all art comes from abnormal brains. So if you create art that satisfies your own tastes, you have created for a market of exactly one abnormal person. If you're lucky, a handful of other freaks get some joy from your creations too. But it won't be enough to pay your bills. It's not a career until you learn to create products that normal people like."
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/comic_fail/
I'm a geek, and an Aspie, and, let's face it, abnormal. The only objectively decent writing I create (see my posts from 2007 and earlier, when I was posting serious essays) comes when it flows easily from me, and THAT only happens within my narrow and highly opinionated areas of interest; I can churn out grammatically correct sentences on any topic, just like YOU can, but it'd read like a high school assignment... people would pay to NOT read it.
I can't apply my "writing process" to socially-desirable content, because I don't HAVE a process.
I'm not even entirely sure what socially-desirable content IS; I literally have no idea what normal people want to read about, aside from obvious things like music I've never heard and movies I've never seen.
AND; I have no idea how to modulate how I word things so that the bulk of people don't recoil from what I write, any more than I can modulate what I say to keep from putting people off, which I clearly do no matter how polite, agreeable and friendly I am. It's an Aspie thing; somehow the "tone" is just "wrong" in a way no one can ever put a finger on if asked.
In a zone as big as the blogosphere, with its highly disproportionate % of eclectic thinkers, I managed to draw a pretty respectable audience. I'm betting that if I self-published a book and offered it for free, a fair # of them would read it. If they had to pay, there's a reasonable chance that a few die-hards would in fact ante up... and that's the "handful of other freaks" that Adams referred to. And that's as far as it would ever go... and that's why I don't write a book.
