Creatively stifled by trying to be accepted and fit in?

[majickdog]

Quote Originally Posted by Zaharoff

I think the majority of writers at TLO are "banned" writers.

Are they "banned" for refusing to be creatively stifled in order to fit in?

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Usually bullying issues, not that many people at all.

[majickdog]

Ah, I recall some animosity. I never paid it much attention.

[Zaharoff]

Sorry. Misfired levity.
Over 20 years, I believe quite a few have received the boot.
Usually for ugliness in the more contentious sections.
By and large, I suspect most lost interest.
I find it hard to believe that those who are drawn to Ligotti would prefer the FB alternative.
Then again, I have learned to never underestimate the folly of species human.

Robert, I hope you are still drawing, if only to retain the skills.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

There's lots of Ligottians on social media.
Sadly, I think facebook and twitter are a business necessity for some people, and even sadder is that maybe people feel like knowing the industry gossip has also become important.
In the comics business last year Jae Lee came under fire for drawing a cover for a reactionary movement and afterwards had to clarify that he knew nothing about the movement because he deliberately avoids all the controversy news.
But I guess the Chizine scandal was important news.

I was recently tempted to join twitter because a lot of artists (very annoyingly and bafflingly) only post their work there and there is quite a few really interesting people there and some activity I don't see elsewhere, but I just despise the site too much and the sheer amount of people I could follow is just too much.

I'm still drawing but not nearly enough.

[nomis]

Peter Straub doesn’t do themed anthologies, either.

There are a lot of thoughts in your post that could take pages to unpack, but I’ll make a few comments (most of which will probably be obvious to you and you’ll wonder why I’m saying them).

There are different writing worlds, and in the world of novels from bigger publishers, there will always be a desire to shave off the weird edges of your work to appeal to the most readers. I don’t think of this as writers writing to be accepted, but writers having to face the cold reality that it’s a business, and if a publisher doesn’t think your book will sell to large numbers of people, they won’t publish it. If your dream is to sell wide and far, your work has to be "safer".

But if that’s not for you, and you’re willing to forego potential fame and wealth, then there is room in the small/micro press for almost any sort of work, no matter how weird and/or daring. The question is can you find that room, and will there be readers there to read it.

I used to think we were in a rare upswing in the number of writers working in horror today, but I’ve come to understand that this isn’t a fluke: it’s just the beginning. The internet has come for our medium and will tear down all existing models. We are well on our way to anybody who wants to be a writer becoming a writer, all publishing on their own or with small/micro presses, and the amount of noise will be deafening. Few writers will make any sort of name for themselves. Fewer still will be remembered like we remember Ligotti, because the structure he worked in is gone. Mass recognition, even cult recognition, is past. From now on, it’s micro groups, just as it is with the world of recorded music. The monoculture is dead.

To be a writer now means asking some serious questions about what you want to achieve, and what you’re willing to give up to achieve it, because nothing is without sacrifice. Speaking for myself, I’m aware that focusing on the short story has hobbled my career in very real ways, and caused me to potentially miss out on some of the things other writers I came up with have received by writing novels. But I’m relatively fine with that because I get to always write what I want to write and I don’t feel constrained by anyone else’s rules. I’m lucky that what I want to write isn’t very controversial, but that luck only means a few more people get to see my work. At the end of the day it doesn’t pay much better than being completely unpublished.

Regarding your later comments on social media: I can assure you any writer with an agent is told that Facebook and Twitter are musts. Publishers want writers with large followings because they hope that means a built-in audience. We can’t separate commerce from art, not if we want that art viewed by more than a handful of people.

[ToALonelyPeace]

@nomis: You've summed up what I fear so well. Even mainstream literature is dying. Who read Nobel Prize in Literature or Pulitzer Prize novels anymore? If you want to survive it would be better to write a "How to write" book or fanfiction or pack your bags and join the movie/video game industries.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Thankyou Simon. I'm quite alarmed to find that I've been misreading your second name as "Stranzas" for over a decade!

Before the internet was widely used enough, who were the most daring and esoteric horror publishers?

I'm curious about already established writers on social media. China Mieville has no social media. Patricia Mckillip is of a generation that maybe isn't expected to have an internet presence. Did anyone ask Gene Wolfe to get on twitter? Alan Moore was on goodreads for a short time and swamped with questions. Tanith Lee resented having to have a blog but she gave it up after a while. I don't think Susanna Clarke is on social media.
I guess they're all successful enough to get away with it.

ToALonelyPeace - Are you not at all excited about a proliferation of microgroups?
In Manga Zombie the writer Udagawa Takeo celebrated niche bizarre manga but also lamented how fractured and separate genres had become, as if there wasn't anything for a wider audience anymore. I didn't really get his meaning about why this was a problem.

[ToALonelyPeace]

Quote Originally Posted by Robert Adam Gilmour

ToALonelyPeace - Are you not at all excited about a proliferation of microgroups? In Manga Zombie the writer Udagawa Takeo celebrated niche bizarre manga but also lamented how fractured and separate genres had become, as if there wasn't anything for a wider audience anymore. I didn't really get his meaning about why this was a problem.

I think of books/manga/art in general as food. There are only so much each person can consume. It's good there is a proliferation of art and such a great variety to look at but the abundance makes a person weary. The artists/writers who are increasing every year will make even more stuffs but their fans have not increased as much to consume all their art. So the creators will have to be each other's fans or share smaller and smaller fanbase at which point the published work will have the same number of readers as a piece of fanfiction (maybe even less).

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

Hopefully there will be increasingly sophisticated ways of finding what you want or even trying new things you weren't predisposed to.

One of the good things about television over two decades ago is that there were slots for niche interests (usually late at night) and you could stumble on new things. Some of us are reveling in niches and micro-cultures but I think there are some less curious people who may never escape monoculture.

Borders used to have a huge magazine selection for all kinds of things and the vast majority of these magazines either moved to the internet or were replaced by it and we can no longer gaze across all these varied interests and subcultures in the same way.
Although I've been bashing twitter, I think it has retained a bit of that quality of stumbling on unexpected wonderful things more than a lot of other sites.

I hope people don't become defeatist about the kind of audience they can have. Perhaps cultures will emerge that wont be so easily dominated by blockbuster entertainment.