I used the word "cut" in the title to mean the Prolog operator "cut", an operator which halts the evaluation of a statement in predicate logic.
Fiction writers often complain, "I keep procrastinating from writing," and, "Nobody reads what I write." These complaints are usually the result of shoulds stopping them from thinking about their wants.
I've never heard anyone say, "I keep putting off playing baseball," or, "I keep putting off eating ice cream." People who keep putting off writing don't want to write, they want to have written. If you have to try to write more often than you have to try not to write, you've probably told yourself that you should write in order to attain some reward. There's nothing wrong with that, but writers who complain that they keep putting off writing are often writing things with little potential payoff, like fan-fiction. They don't stop and think how to improve the payoff that they want, because they get stuck on the should that they've cached in their heads.
I've repeatedly tried to help writers who complain that not enough people read what they write. I explain that if you want to be read by a lot of people, you need to write something that a lot of people want to read. This seems obvious to me, but I'm always immediately attacked by indignant writers saying that they want to write great fiction, and that one should write only to please oneself in order to write great fiction. Sometimes these are the same people who complained that they want more people to read what they write.
Why does their desire to write great fiction take complete precedence over their desire to have readers? Because they have cached that desire as a should. (They haven't cached a should for their goal to get more readers because that goal arose much later, after they had already learned to write well and discovered, to their horror, that just writing well doesn't bring you readers.) For a moral agent, shoulds trump wants, by definition.
I've explained before that I don't think there is any deep difference between wants and shoulds. The English language doesn't pretend there is; we say "I should do X" both to mean "I have a moral obligation to do X" and "I need to do X to satisfy my goals." The problem is that most people think there is a difference, and that shoulds are more important. They have a want, they figure out what they need to do to satisfy it, they think aloud to themselves that they should do it, and boom, they have lexically convinced themselves that they have a moral obligation to do it.
I think you're making (among others) the following two quite different points. (1) If you keep putting something off, it probably means that what you want is more to have done it than to do it, and you should face that honestly. (2) There's something wrong with the thinking of a writer who cares more about writing Great Fiction than about writing what readers actually want to read (and the something-wrong is to do with turning pragmatic goals into moral imperatives).
I think there's a lot of truth to #1 but am very unconvinced by #2. After all, you yourself propose that these authors are more fundamentally concerned with Writing Great Fiction than with writing stuff that lots of people want to read; what do you think is wrong with that? (Other than that it doesn't pay the bills very well for most people, but I don't think "prioritize money above all else" is a fundamental principle of rationality.)
More precisely, I propose the following model for at least some of those authors. What they primarily want (for whatever reason) is to write well, which they might if pressed instrumentalize by saying that this means writing that, in the long run, most of the most discerning readers would find admirable. (There is some circularity here, but it's defensible.) They also want to have people read their good writing, because they think that would be to the benefit of the readers; and they also want to have people read whatever the actually end up writing, because that would bring them money and visibility and so forth. They prioritize those goals in that order; what drives them to write is the desire to write well, and they would be dissatisfied with providing lots of popular but (in their view) low-quality stuff not only because they aren't interested in writing it but also because they think it wouldn't be good for their readers. They complain that no one reads what they write because they think that reading what they write would benefit their readers, and saying "so write what they want to read" doesn't address this because they think that then reading their stuff would benefit their readers less. The only moral value involved here is that of wanting people to have things that are good for them, which is a widely shared goal and one I wouldn't have thought you'd want to condemn.
I think that (1) this model gives a plausible account of what these writers do and say, (2) it doesn't have to involve "cacheing desires as shoulds", and (3) it doesn't have to involve making a hard distinction between moral obligations and satisfaction of other goals.
It might well be that authors well-described by this model would be happier, or do more good, or even write better fiction in something like the sense they have in mind, if they paid more attention to writing what their readers want to read; so even if I'm right about its plausibility it doesn't necessarily contradict what you suggest that these writers do. But if it's right, then I think your diagnosis is wrong.
I didn't get that impression; what I heard was that they have internalized the "should" that they want to write Great Fiction, but the want that they care enough to complain about is their want for more readers. Their miscategorization of their wants into two categories- one moral and one not- makes it difficult for them to compare them accu... (read more)