Prioritizing the Demands

Every time a writer sits down to write a story, they face a bunch of different demands and expectations from several different directions. A writer who is aware of these demands and where they’re coming from can usually make better conscious adjustments when the various demands and expectations conflict and/or make no sense.

For purposes of this post, I’m limiting myself to the kinds of demands and expectations that directly involve writing, meaning that I am not talking about the demands made by day jobs, family, friends, and general activities of daily life, even though they do often conflict with writing. Maybe some other time.

Right now, I’m concentrating on the four basic areas that generate most of the demands and expectations writers face regarding what and how they’re writing. These are:

1. The readers, aka “the audience.” At first glance, this looks really important, especially since writers are repeatedly urged to “know your audience” before they sit down to write. Unfortunately, readers aren’t a monolithic block. Furthermore, writers can’t actually know their audience – they can only make assumptions about who the audience is and what they want. The only audience the writer can truly know and understand is themselves. This makes it extremely easy to misjudge “the audience” – and to fall afoul of the old saying, “if you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one.”
2. The gatekeepers. This used to mean simply editors, agents, and possibly certain reviewers (for those genres where a particular reviewer’s comments could make or break a title). These days, I’d expand the list to include crit groups, online “influencers,” and possibly certain publicists – basically, anyone involved in the production, distribution, and marketing of a title, whose opinions the writer feels have to be taken into account in order for their story to be successful. The internet, particularly Amazon, has made it much easier for writers to get around the traditional gatekeepers, but it has also made them more dependent on the publicity “buzz” generated on social media, and thus more aware of (and more sensitive to) what crit groups and social media discussions want.
3. The writers themselves. Every writer has expectations about writing, from what they think a “good story” is to what they need for their writing process to work. For newer writers, their expectations often come from the misleading portrayals of writing in popular culture and online; for more experienced writers, their expectations come more from their personal experience. In both cases, it’s quite easy for those expectations to be wrong. I have a writer friend who began his career as the quintessential burst writer; he was utterly flummoxed when after fifteen years of working this way, he suddenly found himself unable to make progress except by plodding steadily. I’ve seen similar things happen to planners who suddenly had to pants a story, and vice versa.
4. The story itself. Yes, this is anthropomorphizing the operation of the writer’s subconscious; tough. It’s what it feel like to me when the pleasant little action-adventure I set out to write suddenly becomes an insanely complicated political drama, or the slightly spooky, humorous twist on the fairy tale turns into a poignant meditation on death and loss, or when it simply refuses to work until a minor character is promoted to second lead (or somebody who was supposed to be a major character gets cut out).

Every writer has to decide for herself or himself what the order of importance of each of these areas is, because sooner or later what one of them wants/needs/expects is going to conflict seriously with one or more of the others. Also, the order of importance often changes, depending on circumstances. An early-stage writer who wants to expand their skill set by writing a totally different kind of story (serious instead of humorous, literary instead of pulp action-adventure, etc.) may have no trouble overriding the story’s attempts to head back into comfortably familiar territory (and no other serious conflicts), where an experienced writer with a solidly established track record of selling one sort of story may not only have more trouble avoiding that familiar territory, they may get pushback from publishing gatekeepers and fans of their previous work as well.

The real problem is that writers have over-developed imaginations. When presented with a conflict between the expectations/demands in two or more of the above areas, they can be easily paralyzed by all the possible outcomes, both terrible and not. If they do what the story wants, the editors won’t buy it and they’ll lose half their audience, but the book will be ever so much better; if they agree to write the 201^st book in the Endless Series, the gatekeepers will be happy, but the writer’s brain will turn to mush and half the fans will realize that they’ve done a horrible job because they hate the idea of doing one more thing in that series, while the other half the fans will demand book #202, which will push the writer right over from mush-brain into planning suicide even though it would let them pay off the mortgage and put their last kid through college…

Recognizing and prioritizing the four areas in advance helps avoid the imaginary angst. If the writer has decided that making this editor happy is the most important thing for this book, it’ll be much easier to agree to what they want even if the writer’s imagination pictures “the readers” hating the result. If it’s writing the best possible story that’s most important, it’s easier to give the editor a polite “no.”

Speaking personally, my base priority scale is the reverse of what I present above: absent circumstances, the story comes first; then what I want; then what the editor wants; then “the audience.” “Circumstances” include, but are not limited to: having a contract to write a certain book or type of book; deciding I want to experiment with something (e.g. viewpoint, nonlinear storytelling); gifting a themed piece for something/someone (e.g. a charity fundraiser, my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary) I care about.