This is another in a series of “what I get asked at book events.” This one, however, usually comes in a workshop or a panel on writing and publishing, so the question is nuanced.

“Do you write for the reader or for yourself?”

My glib answer would be yes.

But let’s elaborate.

I was recently at a writer friend’s book launch, and the conversation came around to this very question. I agreed with this author’s answer, that basically, writers do both. We know our genre. We know the audience for that genre and what they expect in a book of that genre. But, we also know we have a story to tell, and it’s nice when you get to tell it your way.

I’m familiar with this author’s books, and I must say they do both very well.

However, the author also outlined issues she’d had in traditional publishing with editors and publishers themselves. No say on covers, no say on titles, and only limited say on the story. It might be your name on the cover, but sometimes it’s not the story how you wanted to tell it.

This is one of the reasons I created my own publishing imprint. I’d done the round of querying agents and small presses and even had a small press express interest in publishing what ended up being my first novel, A War of Deception. After speaking with the acquisitions editor, I realized that in order to have them publish my book, I had to write their story, not mine.

My female character was too strong. She needed to cry more. She needed to show her vulnerability. She needed to defer to the senior operative in her partnership, a man. Why, I asked. Because that’s what readers want. They don’t want pushy, mouthy women who can take care of themselves. (BTW, I’m a pushy, mouthy woman who can take care of herself and has. I wouldn’t even know how to write a meek, quiet woman who needs rescuing.)

I said, bullsh*t.

I write historical fiction, so I’m going to stay within the constraints of history. I’m not going to deliberately change a significant historical event. I’ll use dramatic license, but the topics I decide to write about are, as Doctor Who would say, a fixed point in time. They’re immutable, and I’m not going to change them to appeal to some amorphous audience.

A little diversion here. This is one of the aspects about marketing that I abhor. Every marketing consultant I’ve ever used tasked me to define my typical reader. I have no clue what a typical reader is for my work. I mean I could pay thousands of dollars for a focus group or polls, but why? I do know from communications from readers that they’re young, old, male, female, English teachers, firefighters, Boomers, Millennials, Gen X, and whatever comes after that. But marketing requires specificity. You need to “drill down” in the data and come up with the ideal reader of your work — and write what this nonexistent person wants to read.

Ah, no.

I mean, I do keep readers in mind when I develop a story, in the sense that I want them to be engaged enough to keep turning pages. I also want to educate them somewhat, go behind the scenes of something in history they may only have superficial knowledge of. Kinda like me and the Olympic sport of curling.

When I decided to write about what led up to the Oklahoma City Bombing (the series A Perfect Hatred), the motivations of the domestic terrorists, the political climate at the time, I stuck to the facts. That’s for the education part, but research only goes so far, so I added artistic license for the page turning part. The only negative, if you could call it that, was from a long-time reader who let me know he thought I was too soft on the character based on Timothy McVeigh, but only at the end at his execution. (Which was based, by the way, on a reporter’s eye witness story on the execution.)

I wrote the story I wanted to write, and readers turned the pages.

The same is true for whatever I’ve written, a novel, a short story, flash fiction. The reader is always in the back of my mind, but the story how I want to tell it is at the front. And if you tell a good story, there’ll always be a reader for it.

So, do I write for the reader or for myself?

Yes.