People have different tastes and different points of view. No one reasonably expects everyone to sing the praises of every book. Some people will interpret the villains as heroes and the heroes as villains. Some people will find your sex scene hilarious.

Some people will find your epic space battle boring. If you’ve lived months in your protagonist’s’ head, to the point you were responding to your significant other in the wrong voice, someone will bitch about your flat characterization. If you spent five years carefully crafting your prose, someone will mock you for clumsy language. It doesn’t matter how much effort you spent on making a story perfect, it doesn’t matter how emotionally raw you felt bleeding those words on the page, it doesn’t matter if it’s your first novel or your hundredth, it will find its way into the hands of someone who absolutely loathes it. And no one gets to choose the audience’s reactions. You don’t get to choose your audience, unless you’re just handing out manuscripts to your immediate family and friends. There is no finer compliment that a reader can pay you, than saying that something you wrote inspired the intended emotions fear, or excitement, or joy, or passion, or sadness. I don’t care how long you’ve been doing it there is little that can compare to the emotional reward of hearing that you effectively achieved that goal. Writers, especially in the fiction trade, pour our hearts and souls onto the page in hopes that we can engage others to feel some of the emotion we’ve felt.

The act of writing implies communication to an audience.

Marked by S. Andrew Swann