I'm probably not your target, but that being said, I think it's totally fair to challenge your readers.
With the West novels, I don't have a target audience in mind -- they're my internal idea of what I want to read, on some level. But they're odd. I have a yahoo group -- well, someone else started it, but I answer things on occasion there -- and I tend to stay firmly out of the threads in which people speculate about what will happen in future books. I did read one post about it -- I honestly can't remember whose -- and what I came away with was I'm not very clever. At all.
Most of the ideas struck me as vastly more clever than I am, and I had that authorial pause of despair, in which one thinks "omg everyone is going to be disappointed at how obvious things are". Maybe because I don't think of myself as a surprising or clever author, I just try to tell a story that stays true to the characters as they evolve -- I want people to be moved by things in the same way I'm moved by them. If that makes sense.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-04-04 02:47 am (UTC)With the West novels, I don't have a target audience in mind -- they're my internal idea of what I want to read, on some level. But they're odd. I have a yahoo group -- well, someone else started it, but I answer things on occasion there -- and I tend to stay firmly out of the threads in which people speculate about what will happen in future books. I did read one post about it -- I honestly can't remember whose -- and what I came away with was I'm not very clever. At all.
Most of the ideas struck me as vastly more clever than I am, and I had that authorial pause of despair, in which one thinks "omg everyone is going to be disappointed at how obvious things are". Maybe because I don't think of myself as a surprising or clever author, I just try to tell a story that stays true to the characters as they evolve -- I want people to be moved by things in the same way I'm moved by them. If that makes sense.