To write or be published

A while back I wrote a post about ratings on goodreads, my bottom line basically being that different people have different tastes. Someone’s trash is somebody else’s treasure (or if you’re like me, you love your trash).

More insightful, perhaps, is this quote James posted in the comments:

"It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need." –Alan Moore


And it’s got me thinking.

A lot of advice to writers I read is about getting published (see my toolkit to know what I mean). From what I understand, publishers are very timorous. They buy what they know will sell. So if I want to be published, I need to write what sells. And I understand that. I don’t think studying the market is a cynical way of writing. After all, why should anybody take a financial risk on my behalf? How can I expect to be read if I don’t write something people want to read? Good writing takes into account the audience and how the reader will be gripped – even my nine-year-olds learn this. Fine. Don’t write shite and expect others to read it.

But I don’t think it’s that simple.  I recently read this interview with a literary author whose book, Even the Dogs, I had just read – the book is depressing and certainly literary, but also very clever, in a way I will never be able to write. The part of the interview that struck me was this:

"When I started writing Even the Dogs I decided to ignore any concerns about readers who might not buy into what I was trying to do: to write the book as I wanted to write it, and wait to see what happened."

Of course, as a literary writer he is allowed, even expected, to be experimental. The kind of writing he admires is ‘barely readable’ (his own words). I am writing genre fiction, as mass market as it gets: YA. Not quite comparable. Yet I do think there is something true there.

Yes, I would love to be published. And I have studied pace and points of view and all of those good tips and techniques to make my writing better. As good as I can possibly make it.

But I spend my weekends and holidays writing because I love it. I love Lacie and Rowan and Meuriaden and Faerie more than publishing. And if getting published meant that the changes I was required to make corrupted the core of my book and its message – and it might well be that my current plot/ characters/ story are unmarketable at present without massive changes – then I’d rather carry on as I am now: an amateur holiday-time writer.
I'm not saying there is always a dichotomy (unlike my title suggests), and still hope for a bright future for my book. But if it doesn't turn out like that, at least I have written the book I wanted to write. If I find out it’s not publishable, well… tough.

In the meantime, I’ll carry on trying to make it as close as possible to what I want it to be.