Welcome to Problem Space. Today let’s explore how writers find their unique voice and vision.
Should you write for love or money? One answer to that question is, of course, “Well who doesn’t love money?” Money helps us to feel secure. Our friends may leave us because we’re opinionated jerks. Our health may degrade. But as long as we have money, we can pay the mortgage and put food on the table next to our dentures.
Writing for love, then, means taking a risk. When you put your authentic self into a work of art, you risk rejection. It’s like a love confession that has every opportunity to go horribly wrong and destroy a friendship forever. Not that that has ever happened to me… very often.
“[When] things don't happen as quickly as we want, or someone says something to us, or we get a bad review. Or anything that triggers that fear in us, it makes us sometimes pull away from that love and passion we had for the writing, and begin to tell ourselves stories—that the only way we're ever going to get to the money is to back away from the love.”
— Sarra Cannon, Should You Write For Love Or Money? on YouTube
In The Phaedrus, Plato argues that love is a divine madness inspired by the gods. It has the power to elevate the soul. If you want to be logical, then write for those readers who will compensate you fairly for your time. But, if you want to live in a world that touches the divine, you’ll want to write for love.
And what do readers love? They love active protagonists. When readers see heroes who—although they experience fear—don’t let the fear hold them back, they themselves feel empowered. As a writer you can embody that heroicism.
“You embody everything that someone else wishes they could be. If you create, and if you create without limits, it won’t just be your creations that the world sees. In addition, they will see the real you…and the bravery it took for you to open up and show it.”
— Johnny B. Truant, Exposing Yourself for Fun and Profit
It is a risk, though. And not everyone can take that risk to be their truly authentic self. But if you can be authentic, you might not be wildly popular, but there’s a chance you can find your whale readers, your one-thousand true fans, your tribe.
Advice:
“Write what you love.” Don’t worry about what readers want to read, instead focus on writing what you want to write. By writing what you love, you’ll be able to motivate yourself to write intrinsically.
Contradiction:
Advice of this nature expresses the tension between authenticity and conformity. Authenticity increases the risk you will diverge from the norm, but conformity risks leaving you feeling inauthentic and unseen.
Authenticity: Expressing your true voice and vision through the stories you write.
Conformity: Adapting your voice and vision to match someone else’s expectations, or your understanding of their expectations.
Solutions:
Here are some different solutions one might apply in this problem space. As usual, there are no single right answers. Even if one of these solutions speaks to you today, you might find once circumstances change you wouldn’t mind selling out a little bit if it’ll pay for your kid’s orthodontia.
Equal Neglect (low effort): Writing when you haven’t found your voice, but you’re also unaware of genre expectations or tropes.
Lean into Authenticity: Write what you love. Finding 1000 true fans. Being your own genre. Writing for yourself.
Lean into Conformity: Writing to market. Writing to genre. Writing to trends.
Alternate between Extremes: Passion projects that are supported by more popular writing. Defying genre expectations while also delivering on core emotional experiences.
Balanced Parity (high effort): A fictional universe that is your authentic creation but enforces continuity. Cross-genre fiction. Niche genres. Turning a genre on its head.
Columbo is a great example of turning a genre on its head. The detective story usually focuses on puzzling out “whodunit,” but the creators of Columbo imagined a scenario where the audience sees the crime being committed up front. This lets the show focus on the sparring match between detective and criminal. Instead of the audience trying to identify the criminal, the audience is trying to catch the fatal flaw in the killer’s plan.
This kind of high-level thinking requires the writer to understand deeply what readers love about a genre. While there’s nothing wrong with writing to genre or trends, one risk is that you’ll end up including elements that seem definitive, but in truth neither the writer nor the reader care much about them.
On the flip side, the risk with authenticity is that you’ll skew towards weirdness and cringe, and never find a thousand true fans because they’re put off by your odd fetishes. But then again, some Sardinians are quite fond of a maggoty cheese called casu martzu, and at one time in history gentlemen would duel with live ammunition as a fun pastime.
The internet has a long tail. These days it’s possible to find fame being specifically absurd. Last year I watched an anime set in a world of swords and sorcery where a young man is reincarnated as a vending machine. And I loved it, dang it. But it only worked because it truly expressed the author’s authentic passion for vending machines.
Further Resources:
Here are some exercises that can help you balance your unique voice and vision with audience expectations, if that’s what you want. If not, that’s cool, too. Hey, you be you.
Understand reader expectations and what they are looking for in a cover design in Exercise #100: Please, Judge a Book By Its Cover.
Identify what your Unique Selling Points are in Exercise #103: How to Sell Yourself.
Meditate on the themes explored in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in Exercise #134: Being an Invisible Writer.
Learn to analyze genre expectations in Exercise #186: Different By Design
Learn to resolve contradictions in reader preferences in Exercise #188: Contradictions in Writing.