Writing for the Market

An earlier version of this advice appeared in my LiveJournal in 2005.

Writing for the Market

Writing for the market. Is it selling out? Is it worthwhile? What does it mean, anyway?

Writing for the market can mean writing popular fiction that has broad appeal.

Writing for the market can mean trying to secondguess what's going to be the Next Big Thing, and writing it first.

Writing for the market can mean grabbing onto the coat tails of the Latest Big Thing, and writing something that might appeal to the same readers.

Writing for the market can mean writing what you think the readers want, not necessarily what you want to write.

Some writers claim they are writing only for themselves, and they won't change a thing to suit the market (eg to make their writing more saleable). This apparently principled stance seems to arise most often when they've received a critique that was less than gushing. Call me cynical, but if they're only writing for themselves, why have they shown what they've written to anyone?

If you're only writing for yourself, you keep what you've written to yourself. That's the difference between a private journal with a key and a weblog. As soon as you share what you've written with others, even with only one other person, it ceases to be something you've written only for yourself. It becomes communication. It becomes shared.

When you write for yourself, your writing needs to have meaning only for you. When you show what you've written to others, your writing needs to be able to communicate meaning to them. Or it's just marks on a page.

Two people who've known each other a long time often seem to speak a private language. They make arcane references to shared experiences that are obscure to outsiders. These shortcuts simply don't work when trying to communicate with others. And often, there's a reluctance to explain them. They are private, they are shared only with one other, they have meaning only in that shared place. They reinforce the bond that connects the two, and excludes the rest of the world.

Writing can be that way, too. Through the medium of the written page, the writer develops a connection with each reader as an individual. The majority of your readers are people you will never meet, will never know about except as statistics, will never hear from, never see. Yet the words you have written and they have read are an undeniable bond between you. They are a shared experience, a shared space. In that space, it's possible to develop a private language.

Just recently, I re-read the first three Earthsea novels. In them, Ged mentions adventures he's had that aren't in the novels. This created a surprisingly powerful response. "You didn't tell us about that!" It's as if the writer has wilfully withheld something we want to know about. The adventures are as real as if they had been written down somewhere to which we don't have access. These are words we've been denied. And yet who knows if Le Guin herself even knows what those stories are? What happens, how they end? They have acquired their own reality without ever being placed on the page.

Reading is an intimate act.

Write for the market in the sense of making your writing accessible. Write for the market in the sense of not deliberately writing stuff in the hope that it'll have narrow appeal. But write what you want to write, not what you think they want you to write.

Let's face it, it's virtually impossible to make a living at this lark anyway.