I write the stories as they play out for me and sometimes that may take the story down a road a reader doesn’t like. But if I’m not telling the story as I see it in my head, I’m not going to please readers because my heart won’t be in it and that really shows.

But I don’t think it’s impossible to do both, especially not with romance. In the end, the characters want what we, as romance readers and writers, want. To be happy…to have that HEA, either traditional or not, with the person they love.

Writers only write for publication? WTF? What does that make all the people who write but don’t want to publish? Or the people that write and prefer to post it online for free? Are they not writers too?

Not everyone wants to publish, and listing a whole bunch of reasons that make someone a “serious” writer that only reference publishing is… as you worded it, pretty disingenuous. You can be serious about your writing without being publication-oriented.

I mean, come on. Writing is a form of communication, after all. Any serious writer who claims to be heedless of market demands — as conveyed through agents, publishers, editors, reviewers, bestseller lists, reader feedback, etc. — is being disingenuous. If I write a book that tanks, I won’t be inclined to write another like it — no matter how much I love the thing.

What’s most important is finding a happy medium: writing something you enjoy that also has some chance of finding an audience. Otherwise, crack open that journal.

by Melissa November 5th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I write for myself.

I revise for my readers.

Ditto :)

In the end, I write neither for myself, nor for the readers, but for the book itself. Each book is an entity, a whole (with flaws of course) but what drives me is the creation of that entity.

Market, readers, my own tastes and experiences and beliefs and interests, all play a role, in various measures, in creating something out of nothing. Certainly there is always the sense that this “something” will create an experience for other people, and that is an integral part of what it is. But when a book is really going to work–it makes its own demands.

There’s no book that everyone will love, so it seems most important to me to create a book that has a life of its own. In my experience, by doing that, SOMEONE will love it. Not everyone and maybe not even a lot of people. But because its an authentic entity, it finds the readers who can relate to it.

However, as an author, I am ALWAYS aware that the reader is an important part of the process. I write what I love and what I’d want to read, but if I can’t communicate that well on the page, if I can’t speak to readers, then something is lost.

I think an author can deliver stories readers will want to read, which is a very different thing than ‘following the market,’ AND that authors can stay true to their writing passions.

At the same point, I think that if you’re writing professionally, market needs to be a consideration. Maybe the book you love isn’t viable for the current market, but you have this other one that you’re also interested in writing that is very viable — maybe you should be working on that one first.

Even still, sometimes it’s necessary to take that time for yourself and write that book that you’re convinced won’t sell. Never know, it might surprise you. :)

She says jump and I ask how high.

(I should perhaps elaborate a little on this. I’m the kind of writer who need time to see the error of my ways. And I have never finished a first draft that doesn’t have tons of problems. Give me a few years and I might see the problems. But when there is not that luxury of time–as in it’s six months from publication date when I turn in my first draft–my editor tells me what I’m doing wrong and I rewrite the whole thing accordingly.)

The results, so far, have made me happy. (Although when the first revision letter comes it’s always a Mylanta day.)

As a fan, I think that that sucked, frankly. She had every right to do what she wanted, but me, I wanted more Lord Peter.

Actually, you reminded me of a trilogy by Kathy Tyers that I first read years ago. The first two books were out and the final book had gotten lost in publishing land. There was an emotionally and physically wrenching ending to book two, where it seemed as if the hero would be permanently crippled. I was very much looking forward to reading about the hero and heroine dealing with this, or with him somehow recovering. When the series was republished in its entirety a few years ago, the author had apparently become “born-again” and she revised the series to have a religious message. I started in on book three (since I thought I had read the first two books in the series), and it started with the hero first accepting that his injuries were his fault (for hubris, apparently) and that he must use his faith to learn to accept them. What faith? There was no religion in the books I had read. She had taken two straightforward space opera sf books and rewritten them into “inspy” sf. Why didn’t she just write new books? Argh.

That was a sort of long-winded answer — while an author should write to please herself, she should also keep her audience in mind. She should at least let her readers know if she is going to change genres mid-series, or completely rewrite characters/books/series halfway through.

As a writer I understood that sometimes a character throws you for a loop and I’ve had to fight to get my own back into line without destroying the story, but this was just too much. She pretty much admitted that the only reason she kept the character alive was because she loved torturing her, and expected me as the reader to immediately get behind this new character she had introduced (who was about as unlikeable as they come as far as heroines go – Mary Sue all the way.) This series went on for five more books.

As a reader, I was furious. There was no reason given to me, the reader, to justify why the character was made to suffer other than “I felt like it,” and even that was done externally from the book. The old heroine just kept on suffering and suffering while the hero and this new heroine just kept screwing and screwing.

That’s not to say you should pass off your werewolf story as a zombie romance, because the person who bought it for a zombie romance will just be annoyed that it’s not what they expected. But if you write a really good werewolf story and sell it as a werewolf story, people who like werewolf stories will probably like it. If you write a zombie romance because that’s what’s hot but you hate zombie romances, readers of zombie romance will wonder why you bothered.

When an author writes what she’s passionate about and finds readers who are passionate about the same thing, that’s heaven.

Telling myself stories is, from earliest memory, my salvation and a coping mechanism that has helped me through weary or stressful times. I don’t want to change the way I tell stories in order to please anyone else. Revision, yes, is in part for the readers I do have. But it’s also for me, because I need to make the words say exactly what I want them to say, so when I re-read the book, I have all the joy of being in that world again, just as I envisioned it.

As far as writing for the audience goes, I think genre authors have certain obligations to readers. If I’m writing a romance, there’s going to be a happy ending. If I’m writing a mystery, it’s going to be solved by the end of the book. And so on and so forth.

But I don’t think you really can write to the audience, though, just because everyone is so diverse with their own likes/dislikes/pet peeves/etc. You’d drive yourself crazy if you tried.