Audience Appeal

[sarillia]

How much do the opinions of the potential readers affect your writing?

These thoughts used to never bother me at all because I was the only one who would ever read anything I wrote. But recently I decided that I would like to try to get published after all. Suddenly none of my ideas seem good enough. Every time I think I've got one that will work, I start writing and then have a crisis of confidence, thinking that no one else will like what I'm writing.

I know I should write for myself first and I still have no problem writing something just for me but it would be nice to feel like something I write might be publishable.

Comments

[inkdust]

I think about this. A story is nothing to me unless I care about the characters, and care to a ridiculous degree, and the entire point of writing what happens to them is to convey it vividly enough that an outside reader will care a fraction as much as I do.