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Do What You Love- To Hell With The Money

There is an American book titled "Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow" by Marsha Sinetar. It is a fairly popular book, because Americans are in love with the idea of making a living from their hobbies, their art, their craft, the thing that keeps them sane as a refuge from their day job. "Oh, if only I did this for a living, everything would work out just fine..."

And "this" might be yoga, or karate, or photography, or painting, or writing books, or drawing comics, or designing websites, or traveling to exotic places, or putting on weddings, making handmade cards or key chains or watch fobs - you name it. A professor in the English department at the university I attended once told me "Even brain surgery gets boring when you've done it for the hundredth time."

I have made my living as a writer. I have written good fiction and was paid very little and bad fiction and paid quite handsomely. I have written press releases until they were bleeding out my ears and newsletters so often that I dream about them when I sleep. The life of a working writer is that, by and large, you write what people want to see written.

Which, incidentally, is not necessarily what people want to read. Do you like to read ad copy? Listen to speeches? Do you gain pleasure from most of the news you hear? When you get the news, does it feature the stories you really care about? It is no secret that most actors with successful careers switch back and forth between the movies they make for money - that have little lasting value - and the movies they make for the sake of the art form - for which they are generally paid scale. Nicholas Cage worked on Leaving Las Vegas for "next to nothing" the reports say, and that's the role that won him an Oscar.

The marketplace is the cruelest form of censorship. Not because people in the market don't want to see, hear, have good material - because every time something truly unique does make it's way into the public eye, it usually catches on. No, the censorship takes place with the people who are funding the projects in question. Most funding sources will censor work long before it makes it to the audience for a test drive. The funders have their own agendas, and if they are footing the bill, they will see to it that those agendas are carried out. Projects for girls won't sell to boys. Books for girls don't make any money. The average age of you audience is 13-17 and male - and if he isn't, he wants to be. It's all about the plot. No, they can't have redeeming qualities and still be hip. Do you think we could have a little more blood here? The reading level of your audience is about the fifth grade. Remember they have short attention spans. Does she have to be a girl? I know it's a rip off of Casablanca, but could you do the adaptation anyway? Well, it's pretty sexist, but if we have a female author, it takes some of the heat off. White people only go to see movies about white people, you know - oh, that was because he was paired up with a white guy. You know, lets not get too complicated, we don't really want them to have family problems...

But beyond the dumb down factor, the sexism, the racism, the product placement, and sequel hell, and merchandizing overwhelm, there are other things about capitalism that don't quite work when trading for an art form. Think about the last book you bought. Did you pay more for the book that changed your life than you did for the one that took your mind off a two hour plane ride? Chances are the book that changed your life was something you didn't even purchase, but rather was loaned to you from a friend because it meant so much to her. And one hopes you would go out and buy your own copy - but I have given all of my favorite books away, and I have not replaced them in my library. Some of them are not even in print any more.

So the writer who wrote that one book that meant so much to me that I passed it on to three people, and finally lost it, the one that only sold 10,000 copies and only made the writer about 3,000 dollars - was it written in vain? I don't think so. I'll carry its message with me all my life. There is one such book you might care to read called "Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property", by Lewis Hyde. It suggests that art is something that makes us all wealthier because it is the only product that can be jointly owned by many people without diminishing its value - much in the same way that a kiss is simultaneously given and received. It goes on to suggest a lot of other radical things, like one of the ways we could cure the under employment problem is to pay people to make more art - enriching us all. Really radical stuff.

So, I said earlier that I have made a living as a writer. I have also written for no money. And I can tell you, of the two, I prefer the latter. Now, of course, I would like to write anything I please and get paid for it. I would also like free fish on Fridays. The fact of the matter is that there is a great quantity of work that I have to do that I must believe in first, before anyone else does, in order to justify its existence. And if I believe in it, then it must be produced - because it is there to be done, and leaving it undone is like leaving a garden untended. It nags at the brain. It wants to be born.

I have novels and essays and non-fiction books gradually growing into manuscripts in my "off" time. My friends have illustrations, roll playing games, paintings, poetry, photography, short stories, silk scarves, papier-maché dinosaurs, and hand painted mirrors that fill up their bedrooms and closets and basements. We do these things because to not do them would be to waste something inside of us.

The internet is an amazing new tool. It allows for the creator to reach out directly to the audience and share their work - at least in some media - and ask, what do you think? I used to think I would stand by the side of the road with a little sign saying "will work for praise". Not a very professional attitude - and I am a professional. And I do charge market rates when someone is going to make a profit from my work. But if I were never to be paid for a story again, I would write them and stockpile them and hope somebody found them and published them after I was dead. Because it is the writing of the story that gives me joy, and peace, and connection in the world. It is the act of reaching out to you - the audience - that fulfills me.

Alice Walker said, in her book "Living by the Word", that people in China are willing to die for a metaphor. In China people live two lives: one for their daily bread, and one is their private life - the life of their art form or craft or small business or dance routine - in which they invest their identity and find their individuality. And I think that for every one of us there is some one thing that, if we were to do it anyway, we would feel that sense of calling fulfilled. That thing may never have a dollar sign attached.

I say to hell with the money. Do it anyway. In the words of Malcolm X: "By any means necessary."

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