Give the readers what they want

[THBGato]

With all due respect, then why bother sharing it with others, here or anywhere else?

That attitude is like forcing other people to smell your farts.

Fair... ish (I mean, nobody is forced to read my stories, so it's not really like that at all).

I came to this site as a reader, and it was only after reading a couple of hundred stories that I realised that there would be people here who would enjoy my writing. (I wasn't wrong.) But that's why I share my writing here, having never previously bothered to do so.

Oh yeah, I love the validation of votes, favourites and comments. Of course I do. It's definitely a motivation. But I write for me. I write what I like, both sexually and emotionally speaking. I'm not going to do otherwise. For instance, I know there's a big chunk of lesbian readers and writers who like orgasm denial. I hate it. I'm never going to write a story involving it in an attempt to chase that readership. Doesn't interest me.

However, I'm not slamming those writers who do, to give an example, write kinks they don't share in order to please a readership. You do you. Write what you like for the reasons you like. As I said in the bit of mine you quote, it's my opinion only. I'm not asking anyone to agree (though, ironically, I think it's the post I've had most likes on).

 

[Voboy]

I agree. With all the proud 'I write for myself, reader be damned' be professed, I think almost everyone posting on here it looking for some level of external validation.

Again, I'll gently point out that "I write for myself" doesn't always mean I write for my literal self. When I use it, I mean it as "I write for a reader who's a lot like I am." I don't know how many other writers mean it the same way, but I assume it'd be enough of them that I shouldn't make sweeping generalizations about their motives.

Maybe there really are some on here who don't care at all about their ratings or their followers, but it has to be a vanishing few. I think most of us are fighting caring way too much. The reader be damned is partially real, partially facade to fight feeling like an attention whore. Even some of the real attitude is more resentment than true independence. It is the scorn for an ex-lover, that masks the jealousy and longing when we see them with someone else.

It's why it hurts so much when a story I am emotionally attached to gets bombed. I want others to love it as much as I do. It's why comments can make our day. Or sting so badly.

But we also fear becoming slaves to our readers, losing our own existence in our search for their attention. In the grand scheme, the attention we get here is small and the risks of completely losing yourself to the crowd are miniscule. But artists of all media have talked about this, fretted this, since reaching huge audiences became possible in the last hundred and fifty years or so.

I care about my readers because I am a reader. I read here for many, many years before I ever became a writer here. I still read here. So when these kinds of threads, as they often do, focus on the perceived dichotomy between "us" and "them," I'm not really very quick to jump onto that train. I think my stories do better when my readers are happy, and I think my readers are happy when I'm producing good stories. It's symbiotic.

I'm not a "slave" to them. I've written stories with extremely low views, and those stories satisfied me just fine because I knew I was producing something good. When I was writing my SF series, I was routinely getting about 2k views/chapter upon release; those are low numbers, I think, but since more of the story needed to be told? I told it. It was very rewarding.

If I'm a "slave" to anything, it's my characters.

Sorry to be very melodramatic, but those bombs yesterday really did sting. And BB's comment rang very true in that context.

Hate to put it like that, but the bombs aren't going away. You'll need to find a more productive coping mechanism than melodrama!

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Fair... ish (I mean, nobody is forced to read my stories, so it's not really like that at all).

I came to this site as a reader, and it was only after reading a couple of hundred stories that I realised that there would be people here who would enjoy my writing. (I wasn't wrong.) But that's why I share my writing here, having never previously bothered to do so.

Oh yeah, I love the validation of votes, favourites and comments. Of course I do. It's definitely a motivation. But I write for me. I write what I like, both sexually and emotionally speaking. I'm not going to do otherwise. For instance, I know there's a big chunk of lesbian readers and writers who like orgasm denial. I hate it. I'm never going to write a story involving it in an attempt to chase that readership. Doesn't interest me.

However, I'm not slamming those writers who do, to give an example, write kinks they don't share in order to please a readership. You do you. Write what you like for the reasons you like. As I said in the bit of mine you quote, it's my opinion only. I'm not asking anyone to agree (though, ironically, I think it's the post I've had most likes on).

I believe that most of the amateur writers here write what they want and then share their tales for some sort of validation. That's not pandering, it's pride.

With my commercial work, I have written things that don't interest me, both fiction and non-fiction, but that's what I got paid to do.

Here, I publish only that which interests me, and what I believe others would enjoy as well. I don't have the largest group of followers, the most views, or tons of favorites, but I come away from each story satisfied that I didn't stink up the place. If I ever write anything that was solely for my enjoyment, I wouldn't bother sharing it with others.

 

[filthytrancendence]

This has turned into a surprisingly interesting discussion! I appreciate everyone here sharing some of their motivation for why they publish on here. I see pieces of myself in all of these answers.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the difficulty in figuring out the difference between a story that bombs because it is niche and a story that bombs because it is significantly flawed. There's a lot of potential psychological pitfalls in trying to make that distinction ourselves. I think that's part of why I've gone hard into both giving and seeking critique lately.

Because pretty much all my personal bugbears and fixations are extremely niche. It would be the easiest thing in the world to just put things out and when I watch them bomb just shrug it off with 'I guess it was too niche.' Because it probably always will land somewhere on the 'too niche' side of that spectrum for me, unless I'm going out of my way to write something popular. And that's a recipe for me making the same mistakes over and over.

Ultimately this internal agonizing and fixation on self-improvement is in hopes that I can develop the skills to make my own niche interests captivating to a more general audience. I really do think there's a narrow path to walk somewhere in there between staying true to my own vision and also having enough of a ruthless critical eye toward my own work that I can slowly hook a broader audience into that vision.

And of course I have to balance that with appreciating the attention I do get and the progress I have made, or else that's just burnout city. Narrow path indeed.

 

[THBGato]

I believe that most of the amateur writers here write what they want and then share their tales for some sort of validation. That's not pandering, it's pride.

With my commercial work, I have written things that don't interest me, both fiction and non-fiction, but that's what I got paid to do.

Here, I publish only that which interests me, and what I believe others would enjoy as well. I don't have the largest group of followers, the most views, or tons of favorites, but I come away from each story satisfied that I didn't stink up the place. If I ever write anything that was solely for my enjoyment, I wouldn't bother sharing it with others.

I think we agree with each other!

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I think we agree with each other!

As the saying goes:

Writers want to get published.

Authors want to get paid.