Who am I writing for
Or, why I will never be a famous author
I've come to accept the fact that I will never be a commercially successful or popular author. Not because I'm a bad writer: I think I write well, and many people have told me they enjoy my writing, which is extremely satisfying. But I just can't bring myself to do the things that popular or professional authors are supposed to do.
I'm not just talking about all of the marketing and commercial side of the writing business, which, frankly, fills me with a mixture of tedium and dread. I loathe the idea of dealing with agents and publishers and submission processes, which, as we all know, is a long shot at best. And while self-publishing is an easy way to get books out there, the marketing side of being a self-publisher is time-consuming, soul-crushing, and equally unpredictable.
However, my biggest barrier to building a following is that I just can't bring myself to write in a predictable, repeatable way. Best-selling authors tend to do the same thing over and over again, because that's what their readers expect from them. Even if they're not writing series, they tend to write in the same genre every time.
If you're known for writing paranormal romances, you don't put out a science fiction Western. If you write historical detective novels, you don't veer off into family relationship dramas. There are a few authors who have pulled this off: Ian Fleming famously wrote both James Bond and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Roald Dahl wrote children's books and twisted horror. Isaac Asimov wrote science fiction and mysteries. But these days, that kind of genre diversity is rare: authors are pretty much expected to stick to their niche.1
But I don't want to write in just one genre. I have too many wildly different ideas in my head. I want to write science fiction and fantasy and young adult novels and thrillers and retellings of mythology and social criticism and whatever the hell else occurs to me at three o’clock in the morning. I read widely. I get inspired by all sorts of things. I don’t want to limit myself to redoing whatever I’ve done before. Don’t get me wrong, I admire writers who can do that. That’s professionalism, and I respect that, but that’s not me.
When I write fiction, I'm not writing for a putative reader. I'm writing so that I can get these damn stories out of my head before they drive me insane. (Yeah, okay, it’s too late for that. I know. Hush.) If some of you good folks like reading what I write, that's a bonus. If I can make a little money from my writing, that's much appreciated. But I just can't bring myself to be Matt Kelland, Writer Of Just One Type Of Thing.
I know this isn't the path to fame and fortune, but that's okay. Every time I've tried to turn a creative hobby into a job, I've ended up hating it. As soon as it becomes a business, where I’m forced to create what people expect me to create, I stop enjoying it.
I enjoy writing. I enjoy having the freedom to write whatever I want, whenever I want. And that's all I want to do.
Many of the authors who work in multiple genres end up using pseudonyms: Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) or Richard Bachman (Stephen King), for example. Or they use variants of their names, like Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks, or Joanna Penn and J.F. Penn.
The SF editor Ted White once lamented that Richard A Lupoff would never achieve the success he deserved because, though a better writer than most in the genre, he couldn't bring himself to write the same kind of book twice. And that's just in the fairly narrow confines of fantasy and SF. You can hop between genres and still make it in the mainstream, but only if you're willing to adopt the same narrative voice all the time (think Calvino or Bradbury) and that's as much a straitjacket as genre. In any case, these days publishers interfere far more with a book than I'd be able to tolerate. Traditionally published friends have had whole chunks of their story moved around (unnecessarily, I think) and in one case the publisher even insisted on changing the opening line to force a fit with other, quite different, books by the same author. The last time I submitted a book I got back rewrite notes from three publishers that all pulled in entirely different directions -- and all were absolutely convinced their approach was commercially the best one. So I raise a glass to any writer who just sets out to please themselves. We get better books that way.
Hear, hear, Matt! We don't remain interested in the same thing for our whole lives. Inquiring, creative minds explore all over the place. It's natural that we want our creative work to do the same. Also, we age. We find new world views we want to explore. New experiences we want to process in our art. It's completely natural for our work to evolve, sometimes across the boundaries between one kind of book and another.
In publishing it's still considered an oddity for a writer to step outside their tramlines. In music it's always been more accepted because we've seen more high-profile examples of it. It helps that those are usually highly publicised too, by rich record companies who don't dare oppose them, or the artistes are rich enough to fund the publicity themselves, but it does also do the job of educating the world about how creative people think. Sting can do thrashy guitars with the Police and lute songs a few decades later and he's regarded as a rounded, developing human being.
It's just as natural for writers to evolve.
The big problem, then, is taking readers with you. All the publicity is massively expensive and not guaranteed to work anyway. But expensive or not, that doesn't change the fact that a creative, sensitive, inquiring soul is always going to evolve, to discover new joys, new concerns, to get excited by styles and forms they haven't yet tried. It is the natural creative state.