I actually started writing publishable stuff the day I decided I'd actually like to write something I'd like to read, and stopped trying to think what does everyone actually want.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.
I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
At the age of twenty, having published nothing and having had little guidance in my reading, I decided that I wanted to write.
I like to be read. That's most of what any writer could want.
It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.
I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.
When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.
I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.