Tritely flattening the motivations for Doing Art into a dichotomy of For The Likes and For The Money is shitty, frankly.
"Art" is an overloaded word and, yes, people frequently have confused or poorly-introspected motivations. Telling people "if you want commercial success, you need to be doing commercial art, and that entails curve-fitting what you do to A Market" is fine, but telling people they should stop doing heartbreaker art and hoping for validation because that's not doing commercial art like a Smart Person, that's fucking awful, you know?
Also, I'd like to point out the explanation that @Scampir gives for the whole Make up a Mech Pilot thing, and how that's neither a validation nor monetisation project; if you tell me it isn't artistic in character I'll fucking fight you
I’m a full time author. I’ve published ~15 books.
And I fell into this mindset for myself. Stories were for profit and for marketing the for profit stuff. Part of that was survival.
Part of that was this mentality. And you know what?
A year after I stopped writing for fun, for art, for catharsis, I burned out.
That was all it took. One year of writing for capitalistic motives only and I was burned out the worst I’ve ever been in my life. It has taken me basically the entire length of my transition so far to start writing again.
Now I’m doing 1-2 chapters of living writing, the stuff that pays the bills, every weekday. And then I’m writing at least one thing for myself, one thing that is fun or deep or personal. Not for likes, not for profit. And guess what?
I’m remembering why I loved this in the first place.
I didn’t start writing because I wanted to find a new way to grind myself down to fulfill social expectations. I started writing because that’s how I found freedom from the endless Millstone. And because I am writing for myself, the writing that is for publishing has once again become a source of freedom.
If you want commercial success that’s fine. I also want to keep having commercial success so I don’t starve to death, and so I can feed my cats, and so that I can buy plane tickets to see my partner and smooch her a lot. Maybe hold hands if we’re feeling really frisky. And in the world we live in I need money for that.
But for me personally, I cannot forget that first and foremost, writing is not just about money for me - it’s about life. And when I make it just about money, it just becomes another thing I need to escape.
Which is why I’m doing the mech stories here, and weird trans allegory cyberpunk, and probably some steampunk, and who knows what else? Because I have no idea how to market those stories. I write fantasy most of the time, not sci-fi. Which means turning my writing here into another way to make money would be difficult at best.
Which means I’m once again writing because writing is freedom and it is life and I am once again feeling the burning need to write because I have things I want to say.
And I am never losing that again.
