I know that, the more controversial or hard-edged or bizarre you get with a story's content, the more you run the risk of alienating readers. I do believe that many of the best stories, the most brilliant stories, are those that the writer writes for themselves, without taking the reader into account at all. However, I also know that I've alienated readers with the content of some of my original stories, and have correspondingly toned down some of that content. If a significant number of my readers are getting hung up on one small aspect of the plot that I could remove while still telling the story I want to tell, then it seems to me that it's in my best interests to make the story a little more accessible, if I can do that without compromising its integrity.
On the other hand, I also don't consider myself a gatekeeper for my readers -- for one thing, because everyone is squicked by something different. I have a good friend who refuses to read anything in which an animal is hurt or killed. If she encounters a scene like that, she'll stop reading. As I understand it, that's a pretty common squick with people ... but it's not one of mine, so I'm not going to shy away from including animal deaths in my stories. But knowing that there ARE a lot of people who are really bothered by that, I'd think about whether it was really necessary to the story before including a scene like that.
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I know that, the more controversial or hard-edged or bizarre you get with a story's content, the more you run the risk of alienating readers. I do believe that many of the best stories, the most brilliant stories, are those that the writer writes for themselves, without taking the reader into account at all. However, I also know that I've alienated readers with the content of some of my original stories, and have correspondingly toned down some of that content. If a significant number of my readers are getting hung up on one small aspect of the plot that I could remove while still telling the story I want to tell, then it seems to me that it's in my best interests to make the story a little more accessible, if I can do that without compromising its integrity.
On the other hand, I also don't consider myself a gatekeeper for my readers -- for one thing, because everyone is squicked by something different. I have a good friend who refuses to read anything in which an animal is hurt or killed. If she encounters a scene like that, she'll stop reading. As I understand it, that's a pretty common squick with people ... but it's not one of mine, so I'm not going to shy away from including animal deaths in my stories. But knowing that there ARE a lot of people who are really bothered by that, I'd think about whether it was really necessary to the story before including a scene like that.