Write What You Want to Write

If you buy into the current thinking put forth by most writer's magazines, books, articles and blogs these days, you'll end up convinced that writing for the marketplace is the only way to go.

Maybe. Maybe not.

If your primary goal is to be published – and why not, we all want to see our work in print some day – then understanding what the market wants is solid advice. For publishing short non-fiction articles, it’s the only advice. Magazine and other periodical editors demand that the writer imitate the tone and subject matter of their particular publication.

On the other hand, if book-length fiction is your goal, then the market is just a bit more ephemeral. Editors are usually looking for a spin of the last great best seller. With budgets tight and book publishing company’s lists getting narrower and narrower, an editor can rarely afford to bring along a writer of great promise but potentially small sales. That seems to make writing for their market a no-brainer – but…

If you do not have the time or expertise to knock off a book in less than six months, or you do not have a direct conduit to a decision-making editor, your manuscript will drift for anywhere from that six months to more likely a couple of years before it falls under the editor’s eager eyes. If you wrote to leap on the bandwagon of a particular best seller, that book is old, old, ancient news. There has been time for several best sellers to take its place. Styles change quickly. Genres last a little longer, but they too have their ebbs and flows.

And then there’s the reason you started to write in the first place. Most of us write because we love a good story, we salivate over language, and we have the dream lurking in the back of our minds that we have something to say that will matter to someone else. So, don’t chase a pot of gold – write what you dream about, what you care about, what you have something to say about.

It may be the next best seller.

f & f
Susan

We have a running joke, Susan and I, that sees us sharing digs once again only, this time, instead of beer and cigarettes (that was me, I'm afraid, guilty on both counts), it'll be tea and cookies and incontinent supplies. And maybe a bottle of rum. Our biggest concern is that we won't remember where we stashed it!

However, in the meantime, (we figure we're good-to-go for a least another twenty or thirty years) here's what we intend to do:

1. Make money, lots of money...preferably by writing books that generate enough of an income for us to travel and retire in style.

2. Write books that people want to read.

3. But first, write the books that we want to write, not the ones we think we should.

4. Pat ourselves on the back (as we are wont to do!) for everything we have done; whether we make the money we'd like to have or not!

5. Revel in the writing process 'cause there's nothing finer than a well-chosen word or a well-writ phrase.

6. Celebrate in style when we do succeed.

7. Which means finding that perfect dress, one which hides life's bumps and bruises and shows us to be the grand dames we have become...of course, if we stick to the script, that would be red for Susan, black for me.

8. Take a nostalgia tour of all our old haunts and be able to eat and drink like we did in the old days without fear of not fitting in to the aforementioned perfect dresses.

9. Be thrilled with our accomplishments when it is time to put down our pens even though we said, way back in '92, that if we never did anything else, we would be happy anyway.

10. Remember each and every moment so we can relive them in conversation, laugh merrily at our own foibles and toast our successes.

Over and over again....

f & f Anne (& Susan)