![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
There Is No Selling Out Anymore
Mar. 8th, 2026 05:42 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
scalziwhatever_feed
A couple of days ago the New York Times published an essay from writer Jordan Coley called “How Selling Out Made Me a Better Artist,” in which Coley discovers that all the less-than-amazing pay copy he’d written over the years, from marketing to puff-piece articles and everything in-between, actually made his creative and/or more serious journalism work better, not worse. The still-lingering debate of “art vs commerce” weighs heavily in the piece, as do issues of class and race (Coley is black and comes from a working class background, unlike many of his Yale University contemporaries), and how they both impact how one make’s one’s way in a creative trade.
I encourage you read to read the piece (the link above is a gift link so you can read it at your leisure). I don’t know Coley, or have read enough of his work to say anything about it one way or the other. But I certainly remember my freelance writing years (roughly from 1998 to 2010, when the novel gig finally become remunerative enough that it made sense to focus on it primarily), and my willingness not to be proud about how I was making money, because I had bills to pay and a family to support, and there was no financial support system for me to fall back on. My experience with freelancing certainly resonates with his.
In fact, if I do have any judgements to make against anyone in the “art vs commerce” debate, it’s with the sort of person who would look down on anyone who has to work for a living while also trying to write/create things of significance. One, of course, it’s an immensely privileged position to take, and one that is increasingly at odds with the reality of making a living in the writing field, or in the arts generally. It’s never been a great time to be a professional writer, ever, but these days the field is being aggressively hollowed out both from above (newspaper/magazine/Web sites laying off staff positions) and below (“AI” being used, usually poorly, for a gigs that writers used to do). Anyone who looks down their nose at someone else’s hustle to exist, can, genuinely, go fuck themselves. Short of writing hateful material, here in this capitalist hellscape, a gig is a gig.
Two, and as Coley points out in his essay, the experience of the hustle is in itself fertile ground for writing. It makes you develop a range of writing tools you can employ elsewhere, it puts you in situations that you would not have otherwise been and allows you to mine those experiences for later writing, and it makes you get out in the world and see it from the point of view of people who might not have come into your orbit and situation. That includes any day job, not just ones related to the arts. As a writer, and as a creator, nothing one ever does, professionally or personally, needs to be wasted. It’s all fuel for the creative engine.
With all that said, I think it’s important not to construct a strawman opponent, just to burn it down with self-satisfaction. Coley’s battle with “art vs commerce” was more about his own internal battle than it was against the opprobium of others. I have run across a few snobs in my time who seemed to look down at people who had to work for a living, but it’s only been a few. The vast majority of the creative folks I know are entirely comfortable with the idea that you have to pay bills, and sometimes that means doing less than 100% creatively fulfilling work in order to keep the proverbial roof over one’s head. Whether that has to do with me mostly working in genre literature, which has always been the domain of jobbing writers, is a question to be answered some other time.
The point is the internal discussion of “am I wasting my life paying bills when I should be making art” is these days as much if not more often the issue, than any external question about how one is spending one’s time. For myself, I tended to resolve this question as such: The fact of the matter is I am only really ever creative a few hours a day, three or four hours tops, and often less than that. So why not spend that creative downtime, you know, making money? Concurrent to this, the stuff that I was doing to make that money were frequently things I could bat out fast and with facility, enough so that often my train of thought was “I can’t believe how much I’m getting paid to do this.” I wasn’t cheating anyone or ever turning in bad product. It was just, you know, easy. I was delighted to make easy money! I would do it again!
Anyway: If you’re a writer or creator, never be ashamed of what else you do. It’s 2026 and this special flavor of gilded age we live in at the moment means that what qualifies as “selling out” has an extremely high bar. Making a living was very rarely “selling out” in any era. I think these days the phrase should be mostly reserved for writing things you absolutely don’t believe, for the sort of people you would in fact despise, with the result of your work is you making the world worse for everyone. Avoid doing that, please.
Short of that, get paid, have those experiences and develop new tools. All of it will be useful for the art you do care about. That’s not selling out. That’s learning, with compensation.
— JS
I used to eat sunflower seeds when I played softball as a kid, and I can’t say I’ve ever eaten them since. For some reason, I was getting advertisements for 