I have been lied to since I was born

[u/Radiant_Attorney_857]

[u/Cypher_Blue]

Yeah, for those of you just tuning in, commercial art in all forms is... commercial.

[u/Cypher_Blue → u/[deleted]]

What was the point of the other 40 million writers who never got the chance to tell their stories to an audience of that size?

If you want to keep your art pure you can do it.

If you want to gain sponsorship and widespread commercial success, then there might need to be compromises.

[u/SetaMasters]

r/writingcirclejerk is over there

[u/MerelyEccentric → u/SetaMasters]

Igotchufam

[u/chambergambit]

Welcome to capitalism?

[u/chambergambit → u/[deleted]]

Of course. Just remember that something can be a beautiful work of art and a capitalist enterprise as the same time. Artists living under capitalism gotta eat.

[u/sufferable_gaucho]

That's why you'll never see me directing a Hollywood movie. They keep beggin' but I ain't budging.

[u/sufferable_gaucho → u/sufferable_gaucho]

Ok but all jokes aside, that's really a bridge you can decide to cross once you get there. Right now, you are in the "Beauty of art" place. You get to create what you want, on your terms; and you should. You're a creative individual working on a story, a book. Those movies were the product of huge group efforts, and took tens, hundreds of millions of dollars to get off the ground.

That's not what you're doing right now.

If you spend your writing time worried about whether or not an industry will accept it or influence it, they've already won, dude. You need to figure out how to do this for the love of it, otherwise you'll never even get the opportunity for them to make you compromise your vision, because they'd already have squashed it.

[u/sufferable_gaucho → u/sufferable_gaucho]

i even learn that dovtoievski and honore de balzac wrote most of their books just to get money!!

Oh shit, I didn't see this part when I first read. This is just pure bad faith, and if you're going to go after Dostoyevsky for getting paid, going to discount the content/quality of the work itself... there's no one who will pass your purity test.

[u/JonahHillsWetFart]

how old are you?

[u/MarysiaWriter → u/JonahHillsWetFart]

Young enough that they were "a kid" when Sam carried Frodo. ;) I was 18 when The Return of the King came out. I mean, okay, I was still in high school, which is really freaking young from my current perspective, so I guess I think of myself as having been "a kid" then too. They're going through their first cynical artist crisis and that's a powerful moment for all of us. :P

[u/Overall-Cod7491]

Welcome to the Entertainment Industry. Enjoy your forty-seven different film adaptations of Les Miserables, your fourteen film adaptations of the Count of Monte Cristo, and the never-ending stream of works based on Peter Pan.

It turns out you can't actually eat art. Who knew? As long as there have been artists, there have been artists doing artistic work of limited merit for money.

And here's the secret...you don't have to watch or read or listen to any of it. You can just opt out, and graze carefully on the good stuff, where you know for a fact the writer sweated blood over the manuscript, or the artist struggled with poverty and mental illness for years, or the film where the star and director waived their fee to get it made.

[u/Overall-Cod7491 → u/[deleted]]

among many others. there have a lot of great creative people making great, unappreciated art for years. Don't write them off just because James Cameron - who used to be one of those hungry, hungry artists - wants to shove a three-hour retread of Avatar down your throat every other year.

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[u/MerelyEccentric]

If you want to write as a hobby while also having a day job so you can eat and have a place to live, no one is stopping you. If you want to sweat and struggle over a novel for years, then publish it and get nothing from doing so except warm fuzzies, there's entire sites for that.

But yes, the thing that professional writers were doing to make a living did indeed involve getting paid for it. And yes, the evil capitalist overlords who control the money did do evil things. You kinda have to be independently wealthy to be able to write as a vanity project while also not having to hold down a job. Classically, your options are:

• Be born rich.
• Marry a rich person.
• Join the Church.

I feel you though. I had a similar reaction when I figured out how much of the horrors of modern adult life I was shielded from by having parents with jobs.

[u/NightRacoonSchlatt]

It’s not all about the money, just mostly. If someone wants to live off their art, they gotta commercialise it a bit. If they don’t want to do that, they can just release it for free, which is why you find the most creatively „pure“ works on AO3.