Developing writers with ambition all want to find their own voices, craft their own styles, and become known as the only source for their particular writing.
Then they grow up and discover that editors hate that and want mostly pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft or Arthur Conan Doyle along with retreads of anything that has sold big before, anything familiar, reassuring, or soothing. No one wants challenged, no one wants to learn to deal with anything new, no one wants innovation, creativity, and style.
Most are blind to style anyhow and read for plot points, and those plot points used had better be recognized from countless other strings of plot points or it’s no go. Most are suspicious of words they don’t use everyday, of sentences more complicated than a grunt, of any kind of metaphor. Abstraction of any kind convinces most readers they’re being had, and that rankles — they resent feeling stupid.
So most writers crash and burn and if they learn anything at all they become commercial fiction hacks cranking out extruded fiction product to the very low standards of the masses.
Why? Because “that’s what sells” and making money is the only reason for publishing, according to publishers.
Thus we see that artistic ambition is corroded, undermined, and thwarted by capitalism, by greed, by the lust for gain, by the demand that art pander in order to profit.
This is why no one is ever happy unless they are an idiot.
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