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meaning

Should Art Be Free? On Rights and Motivation

November 16, 2019

Visiting Home for Fiction today and tomorrow, you might see a banner advertising that my book The Other Side of Dreams is free on Amazon for a couple of days. What you perhaps didn’t know until now is that all my art is in essence free: All you have to do to get a free digital copy of any of my books is to ask for it^*. Should art be free? This will be today’s topic.

^* It’s even easier nowadays: Simply visit this page on the main Home for Fiction site, for an immediate free download! For some of the reasons, partly contradicting some of what you’ll find below, take a look at my explanation why I decided to offer my books for a free download.

The dialectics balance between the “rights” of the author and the “rights” of the public. We’ll have to define both concepts in order to make sense of this.

In a way, the answer to the question “Should art be free?” is a matter of motivation and expectations: What is the motivation of the audience to implicitly demand free art, and what are the expectations of the author?

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Worried about Copyright? You’re Wasting Your Time

September 9, 2019

Writing

book, copyright, literature, marketing, meaning

Part of evolving as a writer (and a person) is to learn from silly past mistakes. Another way to learn, more subtle, is to learn from your silly past preconceptions. Writers worried about copyright is a great such example.

Just in case it’s not clear, let me be explicit about it. If you’re worried about copyright – and authors typically worry about someone stealing their idea – you’re wasting your time. Completely.

There are several factors behind this. You might be familiar with some, not so with others. Motivation for this article came after someone in an online discussion (elsewhere, not on Home for Fiction), asked for help with their novel, but was reluctant to supply information. Why? You guessed it: they were afraid others (me?!) would steal their idea.

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Fate Leads the Willing; the Unwilling it Drags: Meaning and Significance

August 17, 2019

Philosophy

change, fate, injustice, meaning, subjectivity

What a wonderful thing to say, right? Fate leads the willing; the unwilling it drags. You might have also seen some variation of it, such as Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant. Originally this was written by the Roman poet Seneca – ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt, if you want the Latin version.

There have been many interpretations of this short quote. After all, this is the way art operates.

For some, Seneca’s words describe something stoic, making you “suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune“.

Others perhaps might see something optimistic in it. I’ve seen at least one person having tattooed “Fate Leads the Willing” on their arm – indeed in Latin.

My personal opinion differs from both these approaches. I subscribe to neither utter stoicism nor manic optimism.

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