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!