Maggie, this is a wonderfully thought-provoking post.
I've been wrestling with the writer/author dichotomy for a couple of decades.
I am a writer (I've been one since I was 7 and pasted together my first written work.) I am an author (I have 7 published books)…but what an author is supposed to be & do is now determined by market-driven factors with which I am not at all comfortable-

Because I do not fit in with the 'author' (or academic) categories, I find myself in the outsider role. And that role has an honourable Scots title, 'makyr', and an honourable English title, 'storyteller', and an honourable Maori title 'kaipurakau'- I think of myself, work with my work, from all 4 perspectives-

Alas, doing something like the Janet Frame Lecture didn't give me the time or space to cover everything. I dealt mostly with poetry and non-fiction (non-non-fiction!)—the areas I am closest to.
Maggie Rainey-Smith is definitely a worker in the literary laboratory! She doesn't need me to tell her that!
During the seven years I convened a poetry workshop at Victoria University she was one of the really inspiring, original writers who came through. I admired her immensely back then, as I do now.

A very perceptive and well-thought-out article, Maggie. The conflict between 'literary' and 'commercial' is a complex and thorny issue.

I'd say that this is also one of the very few occasions where a middle ground is not a weakened compromise and is actually desirable. If an author can craft something of genuine beauty and insight that touches a chord in popular hearts as opposed to CNZ commitees, then s/he has succeeded.

I felt that Cormac McCarthy had managed this with “The Road” - as indeed has our very own Islander.

Chris

I agree the the laboratory model is what makes for interesting writing, but if what is written, however wonderful, isn't going to be read it is never going to be literature and, really, may as well not have been written (as far as anyone other than the author is concerned (and even for them too: without a readership and incisive critical response, the writer is just playing in their room)). If Brod had burned Kafka's manuscripts as he had been requested, yes, Kafka whould have been a 'writer', but as far as I am concerned, as far as literature is concerned, he may as well not have been. Why aren't works of transformatory literary experiment by New Zealand writers reaching readers? Wherein lies the insufficiency? Are the writers not producing them? (I don't know (I can't see them (but maybe they're just locked in their laboratories))). Is there insufficient demand from readers for interesting, challenging writing? Are publishers (or distributors or publicists or bookshops) to blame for not recognising either the supply or the demand (or both) for such writing? I don't know, but unless the discoveries in the laboratory, the wondrous progeny of the literary test-tubes, somehow reach the body of readers they are not literature in the full sense of the word and there is little point to all that writing. After all, it was only the publication of penicillin that made its discovery worthwhile.

Yes - an excellent post indeed. As a copywriter for cash, and a storyteller for the love of it, I can certainly identify with the writer / author split. What I'm willing to write and what I'm willing to put my name to are often different things.

The sentence in this post that really struck a chord with me was “The publishers, no doubt, are passionate about books, but also have to respond to the marketplace – it seems non-fiction subsidises fiction.” My experiences would agree with that comment and I'd even push it a step further. When I worked in a bookshop a few years back - it was the high-turnover and high-profit stationery that helped to subsidise the slower moving books… ergo it might be said “The Pen is mightier than the Word”.
Kingi.

A writer is someone who writes. Anyone who can write can think of themselves as a writer and can “be” a writer. This is not to say that the writer is any good at writing, but they might be. An author is a writer who has been selected by readers (through the agency of a publisher) to be read. This doesn't mean that the writing is any good, that the selection is any good, or that the published books that make those writers into authors are any good, or that readers' reading is any good, but any or all of this might be the case. Writers to whom being an author is of paramount importance may increase their chances of becoming authors, but then again they may not. They do not increase their chances of becoming good writers, and may well decrease these chances. We certainly need writers to concentrate on their laboratory work, and we need the results of that work to be distributed by publishers and appreciated by readers (including writers in other laboratories). What are the impediments to this happening?

Ooo ah Unthank - an 'author' - by your definition- is some writer selected to be published - and therein lies the majority of our complaint (to quote.) Self-publishing is now - more than ever before- a viable option for a lot of writers…
may I point out, politely, that 'readers' are a considerably larger population than 'book-buyers'?Many of my family & friends read my published books before they are published.

“Lightning is not seen from one place only, but from everywhere” (Te Kooti o Rongomai).
Yes, self-publishing, for what it is worth, can make a 'writer' into an 'author' (a work is 'set' and some copies may find readers (though I would suggest that, with the media and publishing comglomerates' current grip on the 'marketplace', self-publishing is generally less viable than any time I can remember)) and yes, distributing copies of a work to family and friends can be nice as far as it goes (though Soviet era samizdat distribution is the only example I can think of in which this method of finding readership has served any literary end), but the issues, as I see them, are 1) How can more interesting writing be done?; 2) How can readers be made more receptive to interesting writing?; and 3) Who controls the means of distribution (publishing), whose ends does it serve, and how can a means of distributiton be reclaimed/found/made to connect the interesting writer and the interested reader (making the 'writer' an 'author' in the process, incidentally)? The writer/author dichotomy, in my opinion, is a false dichotomy (and I don't think Barthes meant it as a dichotomy but, as I have suggested, as two ways of looking at the same person (activity: what the person actually does; function: their role as producer of works read (somehow) by readers. (I might say, though, Barthes is seemingly always careful to make it uncertain what he means (less ideas! more thought!)))). If writers are going to get all huffy about what badge they're going to wear, they're hardly going to be changing the world in the way it needs to be changed: better writing reaching more people.

Oops!! The quote is of course from Te WHITI o Rongomai. I don't know how I made such a dumb clumsy and embarassing error. I couldn't quite stop it as it was sending itself. Sorry, everybody (living and dead)!
I should always read through what I write. (100x)

'I would assert that literature , in its truest, purest sense, cannot and should not be thought of as a marketplace — even if it does almost invariably have to leave home and go off to market, hopefully to contribute somethingto the upkeep of its maker.' GREGORY O'BRIEN, Janet Frame Memorial Lecture.

A terrific post, Maggie, thank you. I missed the lecture due to a sick child but have downloaded it off NZ Books Abroad (thanks Louise.)

Greg's speech is inspiring I think because it is a call to remind us to aim for brilliance, to take risks, to be 'absurdly ambitious' and to pursue writing for its own sake. He says: 'far better that writers aim for largeness of vision, dynamism and risk, and then fall short…' He was talking about writing awards there, but the comment applies as much to the 'marketplace'.

Pure writing may not have a place in the market, but then again it might. It's good to be reminded, really good, that publishing is only one measure of the value of the work we do as writers. That we have to also look beyond that gateway,,,,

I think the writer you refer to with the book as 'product' is me, Maggie. What I meant is the published novel is the product of a publisher and the publisher should regard it as such. There is a commercial imperative there and the book deserves to be believed in, marketed and promoted like any other product.

My novel (The Blue) is a novel written with publishing in mind. For a while there it was a crazy hybrid of poetry and prose with a nebulous plot. I believe thinking of it as something I wanted published placed demands on it which made it better.

I think anything benefits from having demands made on it (people included) otherwise they can be come self-centred and ingrowing and often irrelevant. Literature is partly about having a readership ( as someone else commented here) because then a relationship between writer and reader is established and the work becomes something else again.

I do believe that pure literature created in the laboratory is a vital part of a writing culture, but at the same time it's not necessarily better than that made through messy sex between the writer and the marketplace.

Thanks to Maggie for attending the talk and for writing about it - if nothing else, it reminded me that talking can become writing if someone is there to record it!

I wanted to comment on the 'defined marketplace' - this is something I exist in as an agent, but not as a reader. My own reading tastes are all over the place, but as an agent I have to run a business and, more importantly, get my writers published. As much as I'd love to believe I could champion certain works (mainly fiction) and hopefully influence the market to change, I have to expend most of my energy just trying to keep up with what the market is demanding. And for me 'the market' is publishers and booksellers, who take their cues from book buyers (rather than from readers whom, as Islander pointed out, are not necessarily the same people). To be honest, I'm flat out - I suspect all agents are flat out - just trying to keep up with that. Most of the time it works; sometimes it doesn't. The times in which it doesn't are usually the times when I've taken on a book out of love and belief but have failed to meet the market. And then the author is disappointed because they're not published - not because they're not a good writer, but because they haven't written something that the market wants at that time.

I also agree with Islander that self-publishing is an increasingly viable option; the internet has made this more feasible than ever before. I'm not too worried about the death of the publishing industry as a result - there are some books that will always go through publishers and booksellers, and there are some that won't. What will become increasingly interesting is how authors/writers use the internet, in particular, to create a readership for themselves and then decide whether they still want to be published 'conventionally' or not.

NEW ZEALAND LITERARY LABORATORY ALL BLOGGED UP
Every work springs out of the potential for that work to be written, but the potential for that work to have been written differently, and for it to yet be written differently (perhaps quite differently), does not perish with the realisation of the work: it persists within the work, dormant, unseen, unrealised. Under strict laboratory conditions a group of literary researchers have subjected the first chapter of ‘Great Expectations’ to a range of conditions, constraints, reframings and exogenous forces in order to extract a sample few of the countless other Expectations that Charles Dickens made possible without realising.
Read more at http://radicalediting.blogspot.com/