Robert Kiyosaki (rich dad poor dad) has a story where he's interviewed about his book by journalist who's an excellent writer, and having trouble breaking in. He advises her to take a copy writing course, to help her sell her work. She objects that she became took journalism so she wouldn't have to be a saleswoman. He points to his book jacket's blurb which says "best selling". "It doesn't say best writing," he explains. "You are an excellent writer; I'm terrible at writing, but good at selling." "It's not fair," she sulks.<p>niche marketing: <i>Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his books were selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base.</i><p>pragmatism: <i>I’m less interested in sentences now and more interested in stories.</i><p>kill your darlings: <i>“I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”</i> (Samuel Johnson: Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.)<p><i>a marketing genius who has cynically maneuvered his way to best-sellerdom by writing remedial novels that pander to the public’s basest instincts.</i> Sounds pretty accurate.<p>If writing is intended to match the human story-processing system, analogously to how image compression attempts to match human visual system, then the popularity of writing (aside from sales due to marketing) is a measure of its match to what an ideal story really <i>is</i> (i.e. how humans perceive stories). In this view, a story is not an end in itself, but an attempt to communicate; in contrast, "literature" has become its own subject. It is solipsistic. Therefore, it is <i>possible</i> that this guy's writing will become studied in the future (as his editor said of Dickens), because it  is based on reality outside of itself.<p><i>Just remember that when you go over the mountain to work in the morning, you’ve got to be singing</i> Yeah, I agree with the article's followup on this, that it's not clear that he loves what he does for its own sake, or because he's successful at it. I think he must deeply enjoy it in some sense, because he has tremendous energy for it. Or perhaps he enjoys it <i>because</i> he gives it energy and meaning? It reminds me of the conflicting advice posted on HN, about "do what you love" vs. "love what you do". The latter is certainly essential, for even in loving what you do, <i>some</i> bits of it you won't love and you need to do them anyway. And, as apes, we enjoy dominant status for its own sake (aka "success"), regardless of how we got there. I think enjoying how we get there does matter; but it doesn't have to be entirely for its own sake.<p>I love these long nyt articles.