Writing For Yourself

Normally I have a cheesy or sarcastic thing to say at the beginning of my blog posts, just so you know to take whatever I'm about to spew with a heaping pile of salt. But this time around I'm going to be pretty serious, because my subject today is something that I've thought about for a long while. A few months ago I posted about how I excited I was that I had managed to take my WIP to a second draft. You guys gave me a ton of support in that particular post, and my pride had gone through the roof. However going through this fiasco for a second time, I realized that what I was writing wasn't entirely me. The characters and plot were definitely coming from my brain juices, but the content and themes weren't. Those were all coming from what I expected big time agents and publishers would want, not what I personally wanted to write about.

And yesterday when I was going through some of my other old WIPs, I realized that I never actually wrote for myself. It was almost always based on the expectations of people who would eventually help me make it in a publishing company, not what I wanted. I love dark themes, but what I was writing seemed muted and censored so that a publisher wouldn't think it was for a B-rate movie. I wanted more anime/manga tropes, but I always shied away because I didn't want an agent getting freaked out by them. All I was doing was covering up my voice, a likely unique voice that may or may not bring in a huge audience because of my different views and writer's education.

And now I realize I may not be the only one with this issue. Many times I see people asking 'would you read this' and 'would you be interested in that' instead of deciding entirely by what they want to write. If you don't want to write about dystopian, YA , love triangle romance then don't. It's not gonna kill your chances of getting an audience. Because if you keep going down that dark road of doing what people will expect out of you, then you'll hate your writing and what it's become.

Gosh, this was a super serious post. I'm gonna go watch Monster Musume now, I really need to laugh....