I saw some literature forum user stating that literature is the most autonomous art of all because it’s easy to write and publish a book alone, whereas for almost all other arts, this isn’t possible.
And indeed, that’s true. To create a book, a writer only needs paper and a pen – easily replaceable with a computer or even a cell phone nowadays. All the materials are readily available at relatively affordable prices, depending on where you live.
Think about painting and artistic drawing. For those, you need paint, a canvas, brushes… Of course, you can simply draw with a pencil and paper, but if you want to make it more elaborate, you’ll need more items (unless you’re one of the rare artists creating true masterpieces with just a pencil, but those are few). You can also use tablets, eliminating the need for many other tools, becoming a digital artist. But still, you need to find a drawing teacher or learn it alone through books and videos – while teachers of your native language are available in any school, and you’ve been literate since early on.
For sculptures or architectural creations, the problem is the same. You need raw materials (and a lot, depending on your creation). Often, a sponsor will pay you for your art, so you can’t be as inventive – unless you’re a well-established sculptor or architect, so people pay for your idiosyncrasies, not the construction of something specific.
With dance, you only need your body, but you engage your entire body and mind, whereas in writing, you only use your hands and brain. Learning to dance artistically is challenging – quite different from when you go to ballroom dance twice a week.
In music, you have some options: you can be a studio musician and play in other bands, occasionally touring as a hired musician; you can play in an orchestra performing classical music; but when it comes to music as a form of self-expression, composing your own songs, launching your career, and having a band, is what most people think of. Nowadays, you can do this more easily thanks to the internet, but you still need to learn many things: playing one or more instruments, making quality recordings, mixing the sound appropriately, etc. Of course, you can learn all this, but that’s not the norm: most of the time, you rely on a producer and a sound engineer, who ultimately represent your art. You need to find a good graphic artist to represent your music well for your album cover. And, finally, you still need to promote your music so that people want to listen – and it’s relatively challenging to do that with dozens of pop artists, with billions of investment behind them.
Theatre, oh, the theatre! Indeed, it closely resembles literature, so much so that one of the greatest literary figures of all time was a playwright – Shakespeare! But to bring your play to fruition, the author needs a team of actors willing to perform it, involving a production team behind it, bringing the need for sponsorship and third-party interests in who will and will not be promoted in this industry.
And what about cinema? Indeed, screenwriters are much like novelists and playwrights, but making a film requires significant costs (whether in production or distribution). You need financial support, either through public or private investments, and for that, you need to please a series of interests. The artistic community needs to bless your creation, and Hollywood is ruthless. Indeed, there are independent production companies, and your film can be made nonetheless, but it becomes much more challenging with a reduced budget.
But literature is incredible: you grab a computer, write (something you certainly learned in school), and even if it’s bad, you have all the means available to keep practicing. You can write more and more, read good authors and writing tips, easily found for free on the internet thanks to the public domain. You don’t need anyone’s approval, any kind of funding, any elaborate materials to start writing. You don’t need to be rich, have influential people to support your project, or anything like that: it’s just you and your art.
And to distribute it? Like music, a book can be easily distributed as a file over the internet, but with the benefit that the file size is much smaller: on a 1GB flash drive, you can have 10 or 20 albums. But you can easily have 10 thousand books. And in physical form? It’s an item of less than a kilogram, usually, that you can carry around and use wherever you want, which doesn’t require any external device for it to be used and has been working this way for centuries.
Although there is a well-established literary industry, it moves much less money than cinema or music. With fewer billionaires behind book promotion, it’s possible that even small creators can get some attention by self-publishing or publishing through small presses. We know that the main shelves in bookstores are bought, but still, the competition for a small writer is much less unfair than that of a beginner musician, for example.
And more countercurrent ideas can be spread through books – and they are. Don’t expect to see this kind of thing in movies or even plays. The only art that comes close to this is music, but, as a rule, artists outside the mainstream don’t have the necessary resources to make a quality recording and usually resort to music more geared towards humor, not musical quality.
Only with literature is it possible to be truly free to create your art, without the need for others to put it into practice. Only literature allows creating art with simple instruments, available to any kind of person. Only literature can be the true counterculture that everyone hopes will come from Hollywood and the music industry, which are actually controlled by the elite with trillions of dollars ready to invest. Literature is the only way a person, from the solitude of their room, can challenge the world with their ideas.