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	Subtopic	Started By	Posts
	Archive through Apr 05, 2005 Last Post: Apr 06, 2005, 09:39 am		20
	Archive through Apr 08, 2005 Last Post: Apr 08, 2005, 08:54 am	aldan	20

Posted By: cleasterwood Apr 08, 2005 - 09:50 am

Again, I say why can't a good writer do both? Why is it always one or the other? I write for myself but I also write with the audience in mind. Otherwise why bother?

Posted By: Spiderkeg Apr 08, 2005 - 02:23 pm

The problem with writing for an audience is that eventually you want to appease everyone, or at least, your niche. While I'm all for that, and that's fine, you construct stories that are so flat and obvious you run the chance of being labeled a hack writer or someone not taken seriously. There's no problem being a popular writer, it makes you money. Just don't lose yourself and forget to write the occasional novel that could become the next renowned novel that childen in High School have to read.

I wonder if writers like Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway wrote for an audience? Sure their works are debated as liked and disliked, but they wrote some really great stuff about people and adversity.

Posted By: Manjionlaptop Apr 08, 2005 - 05:07 pm

But how is writing for yourself better than writing for others?

Posted By: aldan Apr 09, 2005 - 01:31 am

I think it's because when you are writing for others, you are writing something that you think they will enjoy. How do you know they will enjoy it? If they're buying other books with the same sort of themes or plot-types or other such... so that means that you lose a bit of the "pure originality" that many on this topic seem to believe is absolutely necessary, so it becomes only original in bits, in parts, instead of in whole.

Writing for yourself means that you are writing to fulfil some goal or goals that you have, and make it a fun read for you. You may have very different tastes from the majority of readers, so it probably wouldn't sell well, and the goals you may have aren't necessarily the ones that would be conducive to writing a best seller.

The better writers, at times, can come up with popular novels that are ones that they, too, enjoy, and which fulfil the goal(s) they may have set for their piece. These are often the ones that really become popular in their particular genre, because the quality is there for the people used to reading the same types of works, but the novel can also often bring in new readers who've heard their friends raving about the story...

I'd have to say that Tolkein was one who accomplished this, relatively speaking. Please remember that his book didn't sell well at all while he was alive. The problem was that Fantasy novels were considered trash by most readers, and so they wouldn't even look at the cover of one, let alone READ a word of it! However, word of mouth was what did it for Dr Tolkein, and it can do the same for you if you can create the quality of story that is readable by more than a few people, because as I said before, if you're only writing for yourself, then most others who don't share your tastes won't enjoy it.

That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it!

Posted By: Manjionlaptop Apr 09, 2005 - 09:33 am

Yes, but writing for yourself in definition means making something only you will enjoy.
No, I believe that you write to entertain, not to appease your own ego. It's stupid to believe that if you write to entertain a massive audience you are doomed to failure and that if you write it for only a select few in mind you will succeed. No, books are a form of entertainment and you MUST worry about entertaining the reader. You MUST write it for your audience.
You're all contradicting yourselves. You say that you must research your market. You say that classic fantasy is something everyone still enjoys. Then you say that you must not write for others if they are to get any enjoyment out of it. If you think you're not going to reach a larger audience by writing it for your audience but will write a best seller if you write it only for yourself then you will just regurgitate Tolkien over and over again because that's what you like and you will stop worrying about entertainment. That form of thinking is a failure waiting to happen. That form of thinking will be the death of fantasy.
Louis L'Amour once said that the stagnation in creativity doesn't come from being around the common man and worrying about what they want to read, it's trying to write books that writer's and critics will praise. That was in his biography. So, instead of arguing with FZ to the point of idiocy, you should have just said 'I'm not going to write to appease you. I'm writing to appease my fans' but what you are talking about is writing to appease yourselves. And that's a dead end.