Do you ever get the sensation that you've fallen off the edge of the earth and face-planted smack, dab, SPLAT! into whatever story you're involved with, whether it's one you're

writing,

living and breathing,

reading,

or watching (on TV, in movies, or in real life)?

I love when it happens to me, especially when I'm writing. It means I've discovered the "sweet spot" within myself, found the realm of unexplored passion for a life I haven't yet lived -- whether it's real or fictional -- and may never live, if it's fantastical.

It means I've uncovered a way to explore new emotions, new places, and previously unimagined (by me!) states of being or character that force me to open up places inside me that

may not be pretty but could be well worth the trip.

Bold exploration of new territory is one of the major reasons I write, after all. And that "bold exploration of new territory" includes the desire to do all the things the Lewis & Clark-style adventurers, Starman-style interplanetary travellers, and Indiana Jones-style archaeologists did -- and do: to unearth new territory, dig up old treasures, encounter unknown peoples and universes...

I've known this about myself, my work and -- truthfully -- my entire raison d’être forever. I re-realized it this past week while attempting to figure out why it's so difficult for me to buy into the sheer desperation so many writers / novelists seem to feel to template (and I use the word deliberately as a verb) work to suit the demands of a single reader...

Who Is Not Them.

Generally speaking novel-writing isn't Work-for-Hire. When it is, that's fantastic. That's legitimate, it's a wonderful way to make a living, to learn to make deadlines, to fill a demand in the market and

to reach a ready-made market filled with readers who have certain and fairly explicit expectations for that work.

But when a writer sits down to write a story -- be it novel length or shorter -- she is (or should be!) writing that story first and foremost to please her primary audience:

herself.

Because no one else is writing that particular thing that she wants to read and the story needs to be told and the idea is eating her up until she lets it out.

Today's desperate marketplace, however, seems to have a great many writers / storytellers, attempting to tailor their work to the desires (not the needs!) of a single micro-managing audience member -- perhaps an editor, perhaps an agent, perhaps someone's assistant, perhaps a book doctor -- whose vision of the work is not theirs, and whose desire to stamp the work beyond recognition is...

abominable.

Editing is a primary -- primary! -- requirement of good storytelling the same way revision is. But to attempt to please someone else first and yourself second?

No.

Unless you're telling bedtime stories to children and they're right there to participate in the telling and it's fun for all of you at once, a writer has to

fall in love with her work first and stay in love with it throughout the life of the project or lose it.

I love what I do. When I revise, I love that, too. But micro-management at the publishing level because times are so desperate some places that it's easier for an editor or a small publisher to write a template for novels to fit within rather than to actually work with a writer to bring the best possible work to a large audience?

That's not only bad business, it's bad storytelling.