Market forces
Posted 28 July 09 by Scott AndrewsOne of the voices in my head is always nagging me to ‘write for the market’; another voice is always telling me to ‘write what you bloody well want to’. It seems Lee Child feels the same tension:
“It wasn’t a hobby, it wasn’t for fun, it wasn’t for satisfaction,” [Lee Child] replies frankly. ” I wasn’t one of these people that felt compelled to write. It had to keep a roof over our heads, so it was totally, totally 110% commercially motivated.
“But I realised, as part of the process of thinking about it, that actually you can’t approach it like that. Otherwise you end with this long checklist of things that you are supposed to do – I need this for that demographic, and that for this market – and it ends up like a laundry list. In other words, in trying to make it work, you make it fail.
“So I knew I had to be very commercial, but at the same time I couldn’t afford to be commercial at all. It had to be a very organic process or it just doesn’t work.”
