Selling Sweatshirts, Selling Yourself
What the market really wants / Issue 1,392
Oh, hi friends!
Yesterday, I thought about selling sweatshirts. I actually love selling stuff, maybe it was all those garage sales I went to as a kid. I limited myself to 10 minutes of research. How does one sell a sweatshirt, anyway? Oh look, there's a million print-on-demand businesses. That makes sense. I wonder what the profit margin is on selling a sweatshirt through a print-on-demand business. A few dollars? Hm. Interesting. Let me design a little something first, see if I like it. Yeah. I would wear that! But would I buy it? Would I actually click BUY NOW? Maybe not. So why would anyone else buy it? Point taken. Close out of the store, disconnect the extension from my Squarespace, and find my way back here, back to you.
Sometimes I think the most important barometer for anything we create or share is to ask, Would I pay for / spend time with / consume this myself?
If you would not read the newsletter you're about to send, I think that feeling comes through in the work itself. It feels planned, dutiful.
If you would not read the book you want to publish, the reader can feel that, too.
There is a mercenary element to so much art. Why?
We are taught to create what the market wants, as if the market is a monolith that knows anything.
Where is the surprise?
Where is the delight?
Every time I read a book classified as "literary fiction" my brain begins to construct sentences in a more "literary" way. (This is not good or bad, it just is.)
Every time I listen to an Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad, my brain begins to reach for his melodies and his rhymes. Turn on Sondheim and the same thing happens.
Switch from this to that, steal a kernel of him or her.
Early-career screenwriters are often encouraged to write spec scripts — sample scripts of existing TV series — as a way to showcase their familiarity with structure and ability to adopt a showrunner's voice.
Are you a good mimic?
What is the bigger challenge: writing a spec episode of The West Wing in Aaron Sorkin's voice? Or writing a pilot episode of a TV series in your own voice?
The more you write — OK, sorry, I know we're not all writers here!!! — but the more you do anything, the closer you get to your true voice.
My early plays were full of pop-culture references or quick scenes or snappy dialogue. (What was snappy to me then is annoying to me now, lol.)
Whittle away, again and again, and you'll find the real shape of whatever you're working on.
It's so easy to fall into these traps of what everyone else is doing.
But you can sound like everyone else, or you can sound like you.
You can be like everyone else, or you can be like you.
Your voice is always the most interesting choice.
Don’t discount it.
"The more you do anything, the closer you get to your true voice."
I needed to hear this today. Thank you, Kara.
"Your voice is always the most interesting choice." If you put that on a sweatshirt, I'd buy it. :)