If You Never Made Another Dime on Your Writing…

If you never made a (nother) dime on your writing, would you still write? I stumbled upon this question the other day on the blog A Walk on the Weird Side. I’ve asked myself this question before, only phrased a bit differently: If I won the lottery and no longer had to write to put my kids through college and help pay for our Whole Foods habit, would I still write? Oh, yes. But…

The BUT is always the telling part. Yes, I’d still write, but I’d write something different. I’d write the stories swirling around in my head that will never be written because I know they’re not marketable. Not only would I write those stories, but I’d write them the way I want to write them, full of descriptions and flights of fancy, with no looking over my shoulder or second guessing how my readers might react to various potentially unpopular elements.

Don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy writing. But I don’t LOVE the writing process the way I did before I was published. There is a trade off. Before we’re published, writing can feel self-indulgent, even selfish (particularly if we have a young family). Once we’re published, we’re getting paid, so we can reassure ourselves we’re doing it for the good of our family (although when the demands of the book deadline conflict with the needs of the child who wants to talk about her day at school, the angst is still there). Yet with publication comes a host of considerations that rarely occur to the unpublished, and an expanding awareness of the choices made with each keystroke. Often, our gut instincts as a writer pull us in one direction while our understanding of the marketplace pulls us in another direction. The marketplace doesn’t always have to win, but we ignore it at our peril.

Because in the end, there is another question: Are we writing to please ourselves, or to be read by others? If my lottery winning self were to write those untold stories now swirling around in my head, and I wrote them the way I want to write them, would I be happy if no one published them? No. Would I be happy if someone published them but no one read them? No.

In a perfect world, I could tell the stories I want to tell the way I want to tell them, and millions of people would buy them. That actually happens with some lucky people. I say lucky, because success in the marketplace all too often has little to do with one’s ability as a writer and a lot to do with catching the right bandwagon.

But if you’re not one of those lucky people, if you’re marching to your own drummer and you realize the parade is two blocks over and going in the other direction, what do you do?