This is what it's all about.

You can be free and poor or you can live in reality and live for a paycheck. No one is allowed to just do what they want. Not writers, not actors not salesman, not librarians, not teacher, no one. You always have a boss and someone telling you what guidelines you need to follow. If writing is a career, then you have to abide by the demands of the publishing world. The demands of society which is driven by bottom lines. I'm not sure what her point is, honestly. To write for a sense of freedom and to hell with marketability? That's what private journals are for. If you want to be published, eventually you'll have to do as your told to some degree. If you want to eat food and have a roof over your head, you will also have to do likewise. Art can be beautiful and meaningful when it's motivated by and inspired by emotion and not profit, of course. But it doesn't mean your art will sell, and if so, it doesn't mean anyone else will ever see your art to appreciate its beauty and meaning.

Maybe I'm completely missing her point.

auntypsychotic said:

Sometimes, amid the revisions and the beta's and the "thanks but no thanks" rejections I forget that this is what it's all about for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk&feature=youtu.be

Click to expand...

Says the woman who has made a fortune through capitalism. You can do what you want, and this means you can do as Le Guin did, or you can do as she's telling you to do, which are completely different things.

There's a thread about this in the AW roundtable forum.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=299430

Like anything else, whether what she says is boon or bane is down to how you take it. It was actually pretty vague, to the point that people are making all kinds of assumptions about her true meaning. We all have to tread that line between being true to ourselves and conforming to the expectations of society. My take on it is that Ms. Le Guin was a paragigm shifting author to some extent. She lived in a time when the genre of SFF and was still new and shiny as a mainstream thing (it has been around for quite a while, but it was starting to appeal to a wider demographic of readers by the late 60s). She had a style that created a new niche within the genre.

We live in a different world today. There are far more niches in SFF, and there's something for almost everyone in the genre. But it's also a very flooded market, so it's much harder to push those boundaries and stand out from the crowd. Maybe something will shift the paragigm again, and maybe that will be a brilliant writer who breaks rules and defies expectations. But I think we're living in a world now where it will be harder to do this, even if you're damned good.

I do agree that you have to write the kind of fiction that you want to read in the end.