21/05/2020 - Commercial Success vs Creative Freedom

There is an idea that is popular on the internet: big business stifles creative expression. There is some truth to this. All you need to do to understand this truth is to look at the films put out by the largest production companies, or the games produced by EA, Ubisoft and Activision.

Obviously, if all you want is to experience less conventional art, all you need to do is watch independent films or play independent games. The ‘business stifles creativity’ argument is more about wanting more variation in high budget productions. I have some sympathy with this. I can only watch so many Marvel films before they all start to blend into one another.

I am someone who started his career writing whatever he wanted, with no consideration for how commercially viable it was. I wrote the sort of books that I wanted to read. This led to me writing a comedy of errors about giant spiders in the style of P G Wodehouse.

This is one of the big problems with the ‘business stifles creativity’ argument: Creative people are weird, and when you don’t put any restrictions on what they create, people rarely engage with the results.

Some people loved Confessions of a Gentleman Arachnid. It got a 10/10 review from a respectable magazine. Many, many people took one look at it and thought ‘Nah, mate, I’m alright, thanks’. They weren’t wrong to do this, Confessions is extremely niche.

My career so far has been about trying to write the sorts of books that interest me, but are also commercially viable. Many people would call this ‘selling out’. I call it ‘trying to write the sorts of books people would actually want to read’.