Writing for yourself is writing for others

Matthew Arnold Stern
3 min readApr 20, 2024
Of course, I listened to it.

A question writers face is, “Should I write for others, or should I write for myself? Is it better to write to fit a marketable genre, or should I write whatever moves me?” As Steven Barnes pointed out at a Loscon panel in 2022, there’s an overlap between what you want to write about and what will sell. Those are the things we should write about.

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Matthew Arnold Stern

A novelist and award-winning public speaker and technical writer. My novels Amiga and The Remainders are available now.