No, I agree with you there. You do write to please yourself and quiet the head voices. And writing something just for yourself is great. I guess what irritates me is writers who get angry or offended when their stuff doesn't sell, especially when it doesn't sell right away. If a few agents/pub houses tell you that your stuff is unsaleable, and especially if they've found enough merit to give you suggestions and you refuse to consider them, they're probably right. At that point, you have a couple of options: you can keep writing exactly what you want, keep submitting, and hope maybe someday someone will take a chance on you. The second option is to listen to what professionals have to say (especially as to marketability, if publishing is important to you), and take what is useful. What I see with a lot of the unpublished writers that I know or that I've edited for is an appalling resistance to changing a damned word of their deathless prose. A few common complaints: 1)
The agent, publisher, editor just doesn't get it, as if what they've written is deeply important and everyone else is too stupid to understand. Not likely--can't remember who said it first, but there are really very few stories. We tell our heart truths over and over again, in slightly different forms. A good editor has seen a bit of everything--they do
get it.
It might just not be very good. 2)
It's my 'style'--that one comes into play a lot when authors have horrible grammar, punctuation, ability to structure a sentence, paragraph or story. Bullshit. You can only break the rules if you KNOW the rules, and many of them don't. 3)
This novel is so intricately plotted that every sentence hinges on another, so nothing can be changed. There are a very few great writers to whom this would apply (and if you look, most of them write 'lean' from the beginning). Maybe. And they're not you (using 'you' in a generic sense, of course).
Writing is a lovely thing, I'm the first one to admit that. The flow of words, that chill you get when you know a run of them is EXACTLY RIGHT, making
yourself laugh (or cry), being surprised when a character does something even you didn't expect. It is also a business--a JOB. Many people with publishing aspirations (I'm leaving out the people who just write for themselves here) either go into it without looking at the realities, or refuse to believe those realities apply to them. And those are the people who are surprised or frustrated by the process. If you publish, unless you are very lucky, you WILL have to make changes to your manuscript. You WILL have editors question what you did. You ARE subject to basic guidelines for publishing length in different genres (there are exceptions, but those people are the lightning-in-a-bottle winners). Publishers are selling a product, and they want a profit. If they take you on at all, they already have faith that you will make them money. You have to have at least a bit of faith that the advice they give will help that process along. A writer may not agree with every suggestion, but if one wants to publish there has to be a practicality mixed into dreams. You can keep it exactly as you wrote it, hug it to yourself, and keep it private, or you can publish.
Goodness,
Grandpa, look at me. I answered my own question (and used your fine advice) from our chat (lol). Had to think it out on paper, I guess