What do they want to READ?!!!

Today, I'm feeling inspired. After reading an excerpt from my good friend Megan Bostic's WIP (work in progress), Taking Zoey, on her blog, The Angsty Writer (check it out if you haven't, she ROX), I feel called to work on a story I started a couple of years back.

It's a young adult, sort of a modern day Nancy Drew I suppose, but as always, I FLEW through the first few chapters with elation. NO problem. And then...

I seem to have a problem with the story as it gets into deeper details. I think it's because I don't plan the story out first. I know the beginning, usually know the ending, but how to get from point A to Z after point D seems overwhelming.

I think it's that I begin to doubt myself, and the story. Will this interest ANYONE but me? As writers, we have to tell the story in our heart, NOT the story we think they want to hear. It's impossible to 'gauge the market', as Stephen King says (I quote him alot, get used to it. There is no way to know what people want to read. We can study great books, we can think we know what it's all about and what's going to sell.

But I don't think J.K.Rowling had even the faintest inkling about how a little story that popped into her head during a four hour train ride would change the writing world and get kids reading again. She couldn't know how she wouldn't be a struggling mother just trying to get enough money from a little book to put food on the table for her kids much longer. She wrote the book in a coffee house in Edinburgh due to having no heat, for nut's sake! A boy wizard. Done already. But one well-written story and now she's a literary icon.

I don't think Stephanie Meyer realized how her little sexy vampire and werewolf story would take off and give something incredible to tweens and teens all over the entire WORLD. I'm very sure she read her own work over and over while it was a wip, thinking to herself how NO one in their right mind would want to read this drivel. We all do it. Never known one single author who didn't feel they were walking a tightrope almost every time they sat down to write another chapter.

Not one worth anything anyway. :)

So, feeling inspired today, I'm going to keep working hard. I'm going to not worry about what they want to read and write what's in my heart. And I truly believe I'm going to make it somehow. Just like my fellow brothers and sisters in this crazy thing we've gotten ourselves into because we have a passion for it. We are authors. Hear us roar. At least buy our books and READ US!

Lines for my (not yet published) books...

I was joking with friends last week about our novels being published (for a couple of them, Spring 2011! For most of us, still a dream in the making...) and we agreed that yes, we most certainly want a line running out the door, down the street and generally wreaking havoc in any city we're promoting our book at the moment. :)

But of course, it's not that easy. I won't go into all that getting published entails, but suffice to say, writing the book is the EASY part. Er, well, mostly.

It's absurd to write a book for the fame. Or the money. It's 'morally wonky', says Stephen King. You have to have the passion for it. I remember when I wrote my first novel three years ago. I couldn't stop writing it. I had NO idea what I would do with it when I finished it or why I had to write this story, but every moment was about it. It consumed me. I have never had a story since to do that. It's not the greatest story, not written that well, but everytime I go to edit it, I can't do much to it. It begs me not to cut, tweak or change anything, that it's perfect the way it is (and of course, I know better, but still...). Every unperfect sentence is full of pure feeling. I might have to self-publish that one and pray for the best. But everyone who has read it, despite its imperfections, always wants to know what happened.

I hope I'm a bestselling author one day. I hope I have apartments in a few cities around the world (okay, apts small as closets are FINE with me, just so I can dig my toes in beaches and walk thru little European towns and American cities and call them mine for awhile). That would be what I did with the money, honey. But the GREATEST reward, and I mean it sincerely, would be to know that someone read my story, closed the book, and walked away aching from the story that was now a part of their heart forever. It's happened to me with books I love, and I pray I can give that to my readers.

Even if it's only one. :)