There are topics you can’t help but return to, to grind your mind against day and night like a worry stone. At what point are you annoying not just yourself but your audience?
I think this as a friend wryly tells me I don’t have “range” that I have “never wrote about a rich main character.” And I start yet another story about a working class gal in the near future struggling to make ends meet with a sassy robot friend. Wait this one is different! Capitalism is the bad guy! Just like … all the other stories.
Oops.
Writers are told to “follow your weird” but doesn’t a writer who writes broadly feel more worthy of admiration? Or am I missing something?
I dunno. You don’t have to read two Jeff Vandermeer books to get a feeling he has a thing about inhuman biology. Is he less revered for that? What about Connie Willis and time travel specifically to The Blitz?
For some people, “Speculative Fiction” itself counts as writing in a niche, but even famous literary writers have their hobby horses. Nabokov and unreliable narrators. Austen and wry insights on manners.
I have found myself actively denying myself my obsessions, because I don’t want to be “repetitive” but isn’t that also “Building a brand?”
Because when I sit down and think, “Okay, this time I will write something other than what I want to write,” it’s rather like trying not to draw an elephant.
When I let my obsessions in, those pieces seem easier to write and sell faster.
So this blog post is me giving myself permission to continue to write about unions, about sassy robots, and about pretty young men in trouble. Life is too short to deny yourself a hobby horse or three.
Just please, PLEASE let me know if I start annoying you, dear reader?
