The thing is, though, there is no objective measurement of artistic worth. I'm always tremendously reassured by those bestseller lists of the past, but on the other hand being unappreciated in your lifetime doesn't mean you're necessarily good either. Maybe you're unappreciated for good reasons. (I probably should say "I" instead of "you"). And it's desperately hard, having a career where there is no reliable objective measure of achievement. If I _knew_ my books mattered, I wouldn't mind that I have no money, and am nearly unemployable due to having spent most of my life writing books rather than acquiring useful skills and experience, and am known only to a tiny circle of people mostly made up of other Canadian writers. But I am haunted by the idea that I have more or less screwed up my life and my family's lives so that I can write mediocre unimportant books. And really, there is no way that I can reliably know.
That's why even those of us whose real core interest is in writing something artistically important do find ourselves obsessing over things like sales -- because it's the closest thing to an objective measurement that there is. (It may also be the case that, as things are now, a book needs to achieve a relatively higher level of commercial success in order not to disappear into an absolute void, regardless of artistic quality; I'm not sure about that. But I'm pretty sure, regardless of the quality of my books, they will vanish if I don't manage to achieve US publication ... yes, we all bow before the superpower in the end ...)
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Date: 2006-03-08 09:16 pm (UTC)That's why even those of us whose real core interest is in writing something artistically important do find ourselves obsessing over things like sales -- because it's the closest thing to an objective measurement that there is. (It may also be the case that, as things are now, a book needs to achieve a relatively higher level of commercial success in order not to disappear into an absolute void, regardless of artistic quality; I'm not sure about that. But I'm pretty sure, regardless of the quality of my books, they will vanish if I don't manage to achieve US publication ... yes, we all bow before the superpower in the end ...)