Writing to Market vs. Writing From the Gut
Some observations
Conflicting advice is endemic in writing groups. Do this. Don’t do that. It’s enough to make you want to tear your hair out.
While it’s true that there are many paths to success (mostly involving money, marketing savvy, and timing) it’s really not that helpful to answer questions with a multitude of answers. Imagine asking for traveling directions and instead of getting a clear answer with specific instructions, you get inundated with dozens of choices instead. It’s confusing to the person asking for help, often to the point where they throw their hands up and either walk off in frustration or give up altogether. I’ve seen it over and over again and every time I’m reminded why I went into physics—there is only one correct answer to any given problem (mostly; we won’t get into all that except to say, do not look God in the eyes1.)
Anyway, what prompted this post was a question about a manuscript that is actually not about the manuscript at all, but a question about branding.
The writer in this case pantsed her story and was now facing the dilemma of selling it. Like many people in the group where she posted her question, her aim was to “write to market” and the pantsing resulted in something that wasn’t quite “to market” but she loved the story and the characters. She was setting up a multi-book series for rapid release and knew she had a problem and therefore went to this group in hope of getting some advice. The characters and story she wrote didn’t lend themselves to either the market she was writing for, or to the marketing strategy of rapid release.
When I talk about pantsing, I mean something slightly different than “discovery writing” where you sit down with no idea of what to write. Pantsers generally have an idea of the genre or type of story and may discover the details along the way. Whenever you “pants” your story you have to face the very real possibility that your characters or your muse will take your story in a direction you may not have initially intended. At the end you may have a story that is only marginally in the genre you set out to write in or that isn’t quite as “write to market” (which often really means write to trend, not market; and write to trend means write the same stuff as everyone else in the same way as everyone else).
“Write to market” means writing a Romance with an HEA (happily ever after) while write to trend means write a shifter Romance or a billionaire Romance because that’s what’s hot right now.
What do you do when you have a story you love but it doesn’t fit the current trend? That is the question isn’t it? Again we go back to “Why do you write?” and “Whom are you writing for?”
Just this weekend I had dinner with a friend and we were talking about his upcoming thriller release. Also a pantser, he’d had to scrub 30,000 words from a manuscript because the muse took him in the “wrong” direction. He was savvy enough to know that it didn’t fit the genre or the story and rewrote. Some of you may call that re-plotting. Whatever you call it, the point is that he rejected the “never rewrite” “advice” that is so often chanted at writers like some sort of magic spell.
So you can look at your writing as “This is my market and I will only color within the lines drawn by someone else” and then sit down and write (whether you plot or not). Or you can look at your writing as “I will write it first and THEN figure out how to market it.”
The price you pay for “never rewrite” however, is that you may end up with something that isn’t written to trend even if it is written to market. The price you pay for trying to chase trends or rewrite for a trend is very likely to give you a godawful hot mess of a manuscript, which was another fear said writer had, and it’s totally a legit one.
I can’t find the thread again so I don’t know what she settled on. The pile-on was definitely pressuring her to take marketing considerations into account over what she loved. Things were tilting heavily in favor of the “trend” of rapid-release and algorithmic advantage. Due to the pile-on she may have deleted it and frankly I can’t blame her. You pick your diagnosis when you pick your specialist, and so it is with writing as well. You pick your “answer” when you pick the group you participate in.
Another troubling piece of advice is to rewrite a story in present tense to take advantage of the trend of present tense.
If you think that you can just switch tenses then you don’t understand time in fiction. Yet I see post after post asking “Just how hard was it to do find-replace for tenses?” as if it was just a matter of tense. It’s not.
Why Tense Isn’t Enough
We don’t see a lot of discussion about temporality, sequencing, and temporal shifts in fiction, but it really is a subject that deserves discussion.
Thanks to LLMs (generative AI) it’s actually pretty easy now write a prompt for “switching” grammatical tense. It will however NOT put your story in the right temporal framework. There is no prompt that will prevent temporal glitches from being introduced.
Oh, the “AI” may well shift the tenses correctly in every instance, but that’s not enough to shift the temporal framing of the story. But you do you.
Personally, I don’t care for writing to trend as I find chasing trends to be an abhorrent waste of my time. I’m also allergic to being part of trends for the sake of fitting in. Always have been. It’s my contrarian nature and at this age, unlikely to change.
Take writing men as a counter-trend to writing women protagonists. I was more of a fan of writing male protagonists before the counter-trend. Now that it’s been picked up and looking like the beginning of a trend, I’m finding myself going “ewww.” A male Mary-Sue is still a Mary-Sue. His name is Gary-Stu and he’s not new either.
The deeper you get into how things work, the more you see and recognize the utility of things that maybe you are not willing to do. For example, the fugly rainbow vomit covers that abound today. I don’t care if everyone is doing it. If I have a say in it, I’m gonna say no. Same with the ones that look like they were put together by a child who cut out some images from a magazine and made a collage. I can’t stand them. No, I don’t care if that cover is part of “writing to market.” Go away.
I think a bigger question to ask yourselves is what you’re looking for? Are you looking to ride a trend that may fade by the time you get your book out or shortly thereafter, or are you looking to write something that will outlive you? Are you in it for the short-term or are you looking to create a backlist that will withstand the test of time?
And it’s perfectly fine to answer with the former for some stories and with the latter for others. This is one reason why understanding the elements of craft such as structure and narrative and knowing your genre conventions/tropes is crucial. You can’t answer the marketing/branding question if you don’t know where you went outside the lines or unless you know that you didn’t just think outside the box but somehow managed to burn it.
No boxes were harmed in the writing of this post.
If you haven’t seen Oppenheimer, do remedy that.
The only place I've heard "never rewrite" was in Heinlein's rules. Even he allowed it in case of editorial direction, even those who admire his rules put in the most caveats about that one, and he wrote it in the day where there were lots of pulps that needed stories to keep their covers apart.
>>"The deeper you get into how things work, the more you see and recognize the utility of things that maybe you are not willing to do."<<
One of the things they tell you when you decide to go from "playtron" to actor at the Renn Faires, is that it will never be the same for you. (Same with studying magic tricks and other things that you have enjoyed in the past for the "wonder" of it). Once you have been part of all the scheduling, the rehearsals, the building of costumes and props, the personality conflicts but you have to still work with them anyway. The keeping in character with a belligerent child or drunk, but I repeat myself, and the slips and failures that have to be smoothed over to keep the patrons happy and their wonder engaged, you know too much and you think too much, and it all becomes a chore, albeit a fun chore when it's all said and done. And there are moments of joy, but it gets pretty boring. Reading Slush and/or editing other people's manuscripts is the same thing (I've done both).
Once you know what is behind the curtain, under the hood, in the box, etc, you can never (or at least I can't) see things the same way. The wonder of the story and how it made you feel viscerally, is dampened by knowledge that there was an extra space after that period, a word had a typo, and that sentence wasn't grammatically correct, and the plot had holes.
It has taken a long time for me to be able to sometimes shut down that voice of criticism so that I can just enjoy the brain candy of a good story (whether reading or watching - by the way, I watched "The Accountant" yesterday and really enjoyed it and only had a few nitpick!). And constantly thinking about marketing, and trends and so on would only bring that back to me. At this point in time, even the slightest hint that I need to put the cat in a box and put a sticker on it will shut down the writing completely for me. (And the art, it's anything creative - though I have a slightly easier path with art, as I keep in touch with the trends, but never studied them deeply).
And since health issues shut down creativity, too, I don't need any other weight of critical voice piling on to the little bit of creativity that I can do.
So, for me, I've come to shadowy side of writing. I'll write what brings me joy, sorrow, anger, emotion, because then it will likely do the same for the audience that finds those stories eventually, and if it never makes millions, and it's only discovered after my death, then, at least I enjoyed the process.