Feo Takahari
Auror
There's this idea that keeps coming up around here that you can "write what you want" and have a readership consisting solely of people like you, or "write what's popular" (not phrased as "sell out"--thank God for small favors) and have a large audience at the cost of your self-respect. I'm getting increasingly baffled at the idea that you can't do both.
Look at Isaac Marion. He wanted to write a story about how alienated from each other people are today. Not many people actually want to read a story like that. So he wrote a zombie romance, and got both the zombie fans and the romance fans to buy his book. By the end, it's blatantly a story about alienation, but at that point, it's become too enthralling for this to matter.
I think this emphasis on maintaining your own style hurts far more than it helps. I don't believe in objective quality per se, but I believe that if a lot of people like something and very few people dislike it, it's to your advantage to study it--not necessarily to include it, but at least to learn from what people like about it. And I believe that if a lot of people dislike something you want to write about, you should at least make an attempt at mollifying them (if only so you can attempt to convince them of whatever point you want to make--it's bad form to preach to the choir.)
Look at Isaac Marion. He wanted to write a story about how alienated from each other people are today. Not many people actually want to read a story like that. So he wrote a zombie romance, and got both the zombie fans and the romance fans to buy his book. By the end, it's blatantly a story about alienation, but at that point, it's become too enthralling for this to matter.
I think this emphasis on maintaining your own style hurts far more than it helps. I don't believe in objective quality per se, but I believe that if a lot of people like something and very few people dislike it, it's to your advantage to study it--not necessarily to include it, but at least to learn from what people like about it. And I believe that if a lot of people dislike something you want to write about, you should at least make an attempt at mollifying them (if only so you can attempt to convince them of whatever point you want to make--it's bad form to preach to the choir.)