I've striven to keep a fairly pragmatic perspective when it comes to writing, as has probably been evidenced on more than one occasion.
When it comes to amateur novelists, a group of which I still consider myself a member, I've found little shortage of hope, dreams and imagination. It's seldom I have to tell someone who has already been bitten by The Bug to reach for the stars; the difficulty is usually in how to bring the stars down to Earth to share with everyone else.
I'll give the science fans in the room a moment to stop cringing at the astronomical disaster that implies.
So I've focused on pragmatism and realistic, honest assessment. I have attempted (with limited success) to cut directly through the mystique and leave new writers with very tangible tools at their disposal to move forward.
I say this because, today, I intend to depart from that trend.
A good friend of mine asked for help reading and reviewing his novel before he sends it off with the hope of being published. I'm somewhere shy of a quarter of the way through, and outside a few stylistic nit-picks, I have to say it's as good as any of the books I read for enjoyment (and a grand sight better than titles that have topped the bestseller list, but that's not exactly a reliable measure...)
That said, his subject matter (or in this case, the setting it's all wrapped in) has me concerned. It's a niche market inside of a niche market, limiting the scope beyond what I would consider safe even for a seasoned author, let alone someone pinning their hopes to a first publication.
I sit here pouring over almost 600 pages of brilliantly-envisioned characters, and somewhere beneath the joy and humor is a constant worry that I will be a statistically significant portion of the audience who ever get a chance to read it.
I'm ashamed to admit that I've often made judgments on genres, even ones I subscribe to myself (watch me chuckle at the idea of a post-apocalyptic western trilogy, but I'm already two books in).
I write off the various sub-sub-sub-genres that cater to a populace roughly half the size of a Rhode Island suburb purely because the size of that diminutive audience makes them difficult to reach and rules out much chance of them sustaining a writer on sales alone.
It's the pragmatic approach: go where the people are. Reach a wide market. Open yourself up to fringe fanbases you might not have considered, and never hedge anyone out.
And it's the wrong approach.
Setting aside the nature of purpose, the little limiting factors that tie us to one genre or the next, one audience or the next, are the very things which make what we write unique. If your dream is of cowboys and space aliens, then dammit, write about cowboys and space aliens.
The danger in starting to bend what you love to fit the common mode, to fit the market we pretend we understand, is that you've started to censor yourself. You find yourself believing lies like "No one wants to read about a French Muslim super hero."
Naturally, if your aim is to read a wide audience, it may be better to start with something you consider widely palpable; that is, something equally uniquely yours, but which happens to fall along lines you consider more digestible by a mainstream audience.
But if you find yourself thinking "I shouldn't write this, no one out there is going to want to read it" because you're tackling a subject or a genre that you worry is either too surreal or too obscure to find an audience, let me assure you what I've been forced to remind myself today:
There are almost seven billion people on the planet. Over two billion of them have access to the Internet. Over 300 million of them live in the United States.
Inside a given person there exist a limitless number of wants, desires, hobbies and guilty pleasures. A given person reads many different books, watches many different TV shows, has seen many different movies, or even just told and been told a variety of stories from all corners of their world, no matter how large or small.
The chance that a well-written work will not find another mind outside your own willing to love it either in spite of or because of the trappings it comes with is therefore mathematically and sociologically ridiculous.
Setting aside my misgivings with the wisdom of Henry David Thoreau, there is one statement of his I can't help but agree with: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams." That means setting aside the pragmatic "safe route" when it comes to what you're writing and never assuming that your audience won't love it.
No one knows what the next best thing will be. No one. The number of times the mainstream has been shattered by a sudden strong player from the fringe goes beyond counting. There is actually a musical genre called "Pop alternative" now. If that doesn't convince you that freaks can win the day, I don't know what will.
Save the pragmatism for the business end of things. You're going to need it, mainstream or not, to get your dreams into the hands of someone who's out there waiting for that comforting echo of their own thoughts in someone else's words. Don't silence yourself just to hedge your bets. Scream it out, the louder the better.
Someone out there is bound to hear.
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