Who Do You Write For?
(Post inspired by Jo Knowles' blog post: Write Like There's No One in The Room jbknowles.livejournal.com/409090.html)
If the answer to that question is anyone but yourself, you might want to reconsider. Why?
1. You are the only person you can absolutely definitely please one hundred percent.
2. You can only get inside your own head, only know your own heart's desires. Trying to figure out what anyone else wants can only lead to frustration.
3. Following your own heart frees your creativity. I have written manuscripts for the wrong reasons, trying to please that amorphous someone. It constrained me. My current WIP is one I've been writing just for fun, just for me. And I keep asking myself -- wow, is this too crazy? too wild? too strange? And the answer is no, because I'm letting my imagination have free reign -- because I'm not worried about judgment, because I'm not writing it for someone in particular. I'm just writing it because it's a story that wants to be told.
4. When your creativity has been freed to soar, magic happens -- the story has free reign to go wherever it needs to go.
5. And when magic happens, you have success, regardless of where that manuscript ends up Because that magic is success in and of itself. But chances are if the magic happens, readers are going to end up loving what you wrote -- not because you wrote it for them, but because you created magic, which you wouldn't have been able to do if you were writing it for them, get it?
Obviously, down the road there will be the need for critiques and revisions and clean up. But you can't worry about that when you're first getting the ideas on the page. So set aside all critics, and inner voices, and imagined voices and write for your own best audience -- which of course is you -- and watch the magic happen!