What authors want

Here came the long-awaited sequel to the chapter of yesterday what the ever so illusive creature called readers want. This bit would not have any happy endings or life lessons. To be absolutely honest, one could sum it up as─money, mostly─and be done with it.

No, as an author myself there were a few things more than monetary compensation that I was after. Now, I could not speak for anyone, since there was not that one direction to take writing in.

For me, writing was all about telling a "story". Not in the sense of what one was reading; it was more about your idea of a story...the one that only you personally could tell.

My very first real novel Born&Torn started out as a practice to improve my English and not to toot my own horn here or anything, but I do think that venture was quite successful. Dreams about raking in tons of cash were not something I had when first starting out as an author.

Though, some bad habits from that time still persisted. Planning was still not a forte of mine.

Many chapters were just inspired by random events or ideas. I just so happened to put it into a novel, because my train of thought was as followed "what would be cool to happen next?"

So yeah, feel free to ask me about any plans for my novels and mostly I have no idea either what was going to happen. The appearance of plotholes or similar flaws was only a matter of time.

But, what do I want as an author? That was the self-imposed question of this chapter.

Well, I wanted to tell my story and develop a writing style befitting that story. I wanted to formulate my very own sentence structures that captured the story as I saw it. To an extent, I have arrived at a point where I was more than happy with what I achieved.

But, at the same time, it feels like I have arrived at an impasse. My style, while satisfying for me had few things I wanted and could improve upon. Making it the wrong solution for me.

My former idea of writing revolved all around perfecting each sentence and countlessly rewriting them to create a seamless connection between the paragraphs. The reading flow was indeed well, yet this did create a good and pleasant reading experience.

You see, when everything was perfect there was no method for sentences to shine. There was a bit of a monochrome element to it.

For things to shine, they need to stand in contrast to elements that seem darker. When everything shined then nothing really shined.

Hence this novel came to be. Finding a simple style that appeals to WN readers was the one and only goal. While the ambition truly was a bit murky, I did think that it was a good method to tackle the whole subject head-on.

Certainly, I did realize my overuse of injections/ adjectives Unsurprisingly and so on...but discovering one's weaknesses was the first step to take in order to improve.

Therefore I was quite thankful for having taken this first step into the unknown.

As an author, I wanted to improve my craft to not disappoint my future readers. And whether or not this endeavour truly was a success was up for the future to tell. For now, it did feel like I was moving in the right direction, which had been more than what I could have asked for.

Of course, I too wanted to earn money from doing the things I liked. But, the reality was not as kind to me in that regard. Writing on the daily was not something I was too proficient in, to say the least.

Just compare the quality of the first chapters to the one I was having now.

While I did have a few interesting sentences here and there the older ones were a lot more refined. This was partly due to me actually having a few ideas as to what I wanted to write about. The other part was that the few of them were the result of 3 days of work and effort.

Others were capable of keeping up that level of quality writing on a daily basis, which to me commended my absolute respect.

Though I also became a little envious thinking about what quality writing they could achieve if they took their time. Mind you, I was still proud of all the progress I had made over the 4-5 years I had been active here on WN.

But, sometimes jealousy became a good motivator to never accept your own writing. Because once you were getting complacent with your own writing, you had already lost the battle.

Lemme be upfront with you people about my experience as a writer. If you want to truly get better, read, like a lot. I have read roughly over 1000 books over a span of roughly 12 years, while this was by no means a world record, one could say I had read plenty.

Find an author to your liking and dissect the book as to what made you like them.

Yes, this ain't school but creating a good story was not all sunshine and unicorns farting rainbows. Some real, hard work lurks beneath every novel out there. This did not include Webnovels, for rather obvious reasons.

Look at me typing a rant in roughly an hour, one could seriously consider this not as a display of skill but rather my ability to cook up absolute nonsense. Seriously, there was not much more to it than thinking of a topic and then somehow presenting it as the second coming of Christ.

Like, who could have thought about writing a chapter about what writers wanted after a whole chapter of what readers wanted?

Absolutely everyone could have made up that thought, let's not pretend otherwise. I did not exactly reinvent the wheel by writing about this stuff.

I simply wrote about my experiences as an author. Whoever might be interested in this sort of thing was of no concern to me. Remember, I was just a dude sitting on a park bench carrying a skull─canonically, that is.

The story's been told. End of the story and of this chapter. Tomorrow would follow yet another bit to tell to the few souls that still read this story.

Until then.