Don't Write for Yourself

I know, I know, all of the idealistic advice you've been receiving says, "Write for yourself. Only then will your writing truly be an artful expression... etc, etc." Okay, I'm not here to refute that specifically. You absolutely should write for yourself. You should not compromise your vision to appease the masses. Absolutely.

However, I have also recently read a handful of posts on various forums that had my jaw hanging to my keyboard and my palm pressed firmly against my face. I'm paraphrasing here, but it went a little something like this: "I don't have to spell things correctly. I don't need to use 'proper' sentence structure. I write how it feels because this is art."

That's so profound... and so very, very wrong.

Yes, writing is art. You know what else is art? The pink crayon scribblings of a seven year old girl currently hanging on my refrigerator. You know who cares? Me, her mom, and the little girl (and I'm not even sure about the little girl).

Does the audience make it any less artistic; any less expressive? Certainly not. But that's not why you're writing. If it were, you wouldn't be publishing your work. You wouldn't be sharing it with the world. It would remain locked away in your hard drive, a personal paracosm of emotional release.

Now, perhaps you're not writing for the masses, but you are writing for someone. Whatever your reasons may be, whether it's to stir emotions in your reader, or to express yourself in the hopes of being understood, you are not writing for yourself.

Knowing that, you have to craft your masterpiece accordingly. You want them to read it. You want them to enjoy it, to feel something. You owe it to them and yourself to make that happen.

This is where the rules and guidelines of writing come from. You want your reader to be immersed, not constantly aware of glaring typos and grammatical errors. You want them to feel, not have their brains wash over cliche statements they've heard a hundred times before.

So in the end, maybe you're not writing pop-fiction for the mass market, but you are writing for someone. Just picture that one person, that one reader who will be cradling your book like a treasure box on their sofa in the twilight hours of night. Learn the language of their mind and their heart. Write for them, and only them.