Write To Please Yourself
When I was in college I took a class called Commercial Creative Writing. It was my last semester and I needed one more class in my major and had taken every literature and humanities course that interested me, so I figured, what the hell. In hindsight it was a bad idea on two counts: 1. It ruined my perfect GPA, and 2. It nearly soured me on writing altogether.
The professor was, to put it bluntly, a pompous ass. According to him (and his syllabus), unless your writing appealed to the masses, it was crap. And he proved that by giving me Cs on all my papers.
Now I'm not going to stand here and say I'm a great writer because I know I'm not. However, that isn't because I'm bad at the actual craft of writing. I pride myself on knowing how to write, and have made my living for the past three decades working as a professional technical editor and writer.
I had been writing short stories since I was eight years old, and while none of them were masterpieces, they weren't awful and, most importantly, they pleased me. For my first assignment in this class, we had to write a story about some kind of symbolism (I don't remember the exact guidelines since it was 20 years ago), and I wrote a strange little tale about the Round Toit. You know--"I'll get around to it." It was a kind of mish-mash of Dante's Inferno meets Alice in Wonderland, and when I was done, I thought it was original and quite clever. The professor, however, didn't share my point of view.
"You will never make any money as a writer until you learn to write stories that appeal to the masses."
That's what he wrote on my paper. As I said, according to him, the only story worth telling was one you could sell to the Everyman. I can't tell you how glad I am that writers don't adhere to that ideal. Otherwise, we would be reading the same dull book over and over.
Personally, I write to the beat of my own drum. I'll be the first to admit my stories don't appeal to everyone, and in fact, probably not too many people at all, judging by how many have actually read them. But I'm okay with that because I told the story I wanted to tell in each one of them. It wasn't an editor's story, it wasn't a publisher's story, it wasn't even a writing partner's story. It was mine, birthed and created from my own mind and told exactly how I wanted it to be told. And that is more important to me than all the sales and accolades in the world.
So my advice to any aspiring writer is this: decide what kind of writer you want to be. Do you want to write to be a commercial success, or do you want to craft stories that, while they may never be best sellers, at least please your own sense of accomplishment? Either way, write to please yourself. Tell your story on your terms and if it turns out no one else wants to read it, well, at least you didn't compromise your art for the sake of commercialism.
I like artists who pave their own paths. Who are brave enough to risk ridicule or failure to bring their vision to life. Be true to yourself, and don't stop telling your stories just because someone tells you they don't have mass appeal. There's always someone out there who will love them as you do, and hearing the praise from that one person whose soul you touched can wipe out a hundred bad reviews.
The professor was, to put it bluntly, a pompous ass. According to him (and his syllabus), unless your writing appealed to the masses, it was crap. And he proved that by giving me Cs on all my papers.
Now I'm not going to stand here and say I'm a great writer because I know I'm not. However, that isn't because I'm bad at the actual craft of writing. I pride myself on knowing how to write, and have made my living for the past three decades working as a professional technical editor and writer.
I had been writing short stories since I was eight years old, and while none of them were masterpieces, they weren't awful and, most importantly, they pleased me. For my first assignment in this class, we had to write a story about some kind of symbolism (I don't remember the exact guidelines since it was 20 years ago), and I wrote a strange little tale about the Round Toit. You know--"I'll get around to it." It was a kind of mish-mash of Dante's Inferno meets Alice in Wonderland, and when I was done, I thought it was original and quite clever. The professor, however, didn't share my point of view.
"You will never make any money as a writer until you learn to write stories that appeal to the masses."
That's what he wrote on my paper. As I said, according to him, the only story worth telling was one you could sell to the Everyman. I can't tell you how glad I am that writers don't adhere to that ideal. Otherwise, we would be reading the same dull book over and over.
Personally, I write to the beat of my own drum. I'll be the first to admit my stories don't appeal to everyone, and in fact, probably not too many people at all, judging by how many have actually read them. But I'm okay with that because I told the story I wanted to tell in each one of them. It wasn't an editor's story, it wasn't a publisher's story, it wasn't even a writing partner's story. It was mine, birthed and created from my own mind and told exactly how I wanted it to be told. And that is more important to me than all the sales and accolades in the world.
So my advice to any aspiring writer is this: decide what kind of writer you want to be. Do you want to write to be a commercial success, or do you want to craft stories that, while they may never be best sellers, at least please your own sense of accomplishment? Either way, write to please yourself. Tell your story on your terms and if it turns out no one else wants to read it, well, at least you didn't compromise your art for the sake of commercialism.
I like artists who pave their own paths. Who are brave enough to risk ridicule or failure to bring their vision to life. Be true to yourself, and don't stop telling your stories just because someone tells you they don't have mass appeal. There's always someone out there who will love them as you do, and hearing the praise from that one person whose soul you touched can wipe out a hundred bad reviews.
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