By Dennis Mellersh
One of the surest paths to failure with your book is to write it to please someone other than yourself. You are the person you must satisfy with your writing; otherwise your writing will not be authentic.
The novelist John Steinbeck, author of the grapes of Wrath and many other notable works, commented, that, for him, his writing had to be an end in itself. If he wrote to try to please a segment of the literary world, for example, it would be like trying to write with someone constantly looking over his shoulder. He essentially wanted to write without expectation, other than realizing his ambition to do good work.
For you as a person on the path to becoming a writer, to write even with the expectation of being published can color your writing because you will be trying to impress someone such as a submissions editor at a publishing company, or a literary agent, for example. The resultant writing is not likely to be in your true voice.
I am not trying to minimize the importance or the worth of doing paid work (for someone else) as an assignment or as part of a career (freelance or in-house) in working for a media company. Much brilliant and worthwhile writing is being done every day by journalists, corporate writers, and copywriters.
But if you are setting your sights on writing fiction such as a novel, or hoping to write enough short stories or poems that you can subsequently compile them into a book, then you have to write first for yourself, and not for someone or something else.
As a perceptive observer once said, there are few things more sad than to see someone die with their music still inside them.
No comments:
Post a Comment