How do you write what people actually want to read?

I am not someone who goes out of my way to pander to people. I do not do that. I am too old to feel like I need to do that ever again. I am who I am and I write what I write. For me it is finding what I like to write and finding the people who want to read it.

On this blog I have talked about how I want to write memoir-like things about my life. The goal being to make people not feel alone with the things they have gone through. It has been a very long and emotional process to actually begin to put together something like that and prepare it for consumption. In the meantime, I keep this blog. Fine tuning my voice and doing research on how others have presented this type of material.

With fiction, I write what I would want to read. I see what kind of feedback I get. If I wrote it, it means I wanted to write it. I tend to write more for the things that my fans like. I feed the fans and since it is something I wanted to write, I can always write more on the themes, subjects, or characters that they like.

I like to be experimental. I understand that means I can fail. Luckily, I am not writing to support myself. Money I earn has so far been used to upgrade my set up and make it easier for me to write. I hope to be able to commission some artists that I like in the future to make some work based on my stories, but that is for fun.

I wanted to be a writer when I was very young. I did not want to be a writer to be popular or successful. I wanted to write what I wanted to write. Things that are true to me.

And then I have been encouraged to write parts of my life down. Things that others find interesting or at least cautionary. I process a lot of my feelings through talking and writing, so doing the memoir-like stuff would probably be a good way for me to encapsulate a lot of things that I have worked through.

So how do you write what people want to read? Find your audience! Hang out with other writers who write the same stuff you do. Join clubs for readers who read the stuff you want to write. Do not force yourself to write something you have no interest in to be popular or successful. You can find popularity and success in what you want to do. You need to search it out and find where that audience is and then when you write it, you know how to tell them about it.