What Kind of Writer Do You Want to Be?

A couple years ago, when I was just beginning to write fiction, I attended a literary festival in a small town off the highway heading into the Colorado Rockies. It was the first year of the event and there were fewer than a dozen people in attendance. But seated there, on wooden pews in a former church, I had one of those “a-ha” moments of this writing life.

What kind of writer do you want to be?

A speaker on stage explained that he had created a spreadsheet and diligently downloaded every beat in every book in the oeuvre of the bestselling thriller writer Lee Child. His goal was to understand the common denominators behind Child’s massively popular Jack Reacher series, to parse out the formula behind those 100 million copies sold.

Interesting, I thought. In my college journalism classes, we had done something similar with “writing in the style of” assignments. The idea was to mimic the style of better writers to learn from the way they put things together.

Then the speaker explained how he had extrapolated what he believed to be Child’s formula and wrote his next book following it religiously. It was his first experience, he said, writing to what readers wanted – what I know now is called “writing to market.” The book sold better than any of his prior works, and he was planning to continue following that formula.

Wait, I thought. What?

My inner alarm bell clanged.  That’s not creating, I thought with indignation, that’s copying. I glanced around, curious how others were responding. Some were nodding, others took notes, no one mirrored my dismay.

What kind of writer do you want to be?

Another speaker described writing as much as a book a month. This frequency is largely what had allowed her, within a few years, to live entirely from her writing. She wasn’t winning awards or accolades from prestigious reviewers, but she’d built a solid social media following with her book count and that, combined with some teaching, allowed her to become a full-time author.

Again, I was taken aback. I wrote fiction slowly, painfully so.  That didn’t worry me much though. I thought that’s how I was supposed to write. I thought words needed to come slowly to be savored, that sentences needed to be carefully crafted to be worth reading. Isn’t art, A-R-T, supposed to hurt?

Maybe, maybe not.

I grew up poor and ashamed of it. To make myself feel better, more equal to those around me, I read the classics. In the 1970s, that meant books by mostly dead white men: Hardy, Flaubert, Maugham, Thoreau. Tolstoy cracked me wide open (and still does). Weighty tomes, epic storylines, serious philosophy-of-life stuff.

While completing my creative writing master’s program in the early 2020s, the required reading was much more diverse. But the undercurrent of what “serious” writers do – labored writing on real issues – was still threaded through most classes.

Then I had an assignment where I wrote the beginning of a mystery and I enjoyed it so much, I felt guilty. I emailed my favorite instructor, a younger author/poet/songwriter who’d just gained tenure – what did he think about writing something just for fun?

“I can’t think of a better reason to write,” he responded.

I needed to hear that perspective. Just like I needed to hear the different ways that writers approach their work from those speakers at that tiny literary festival. (Lee Child, I now know, is noted for his generosity to other authors and likely wouldn’t have minded a bit.)

What kind of writer do you want to be? Do you write to market? Or its opposite: ignore the market and write from your heart? Do you want to right wrongs? Change the world?

I don’t know the answer to that question for myself, yet, and maybe you don’t either. Maybe it changes with each writing project or as you get more experience or simply over time. Maybe it’s always a mishmash of all of the above.

My favorite answer – for now – came in an online class I took last week, “Writing from Your Why,” with author Leslye Penelope, who writes fantasy and romance centering Black characters. She encourages writers to create an author vision statement and to consider what success looks like for them.

For her, she said, the answer is, “being someone’s favorite author.”