Catering to your market

In slight deviation from previous posts, I choose to bring in some real-life experience today.

As a person involved in Customer Service, I often find myself in the unenviable position of being subject to others' whims. What I mean here is, if the customer wants something, I'm supposed to attempt to find a way to make it happen - providing it's beneficial for the company. If my boss desires an outcome, I need to try to make that happen, too - and hope that it doesn't anger my customers. Generally, the idea is that the company wants what is best for the customer and vice versa. However, in practice customer service is usually about compromises, long meetings where nothing is apparently accomplished but the stroking of egos, and, in the end, relying on yourself and your ability to straddle the divide. I am a bridge over troubled waters, which is nice and poetic and everything - but it generally means people walk over me. I could extrapolate on this metaphor further, but I think you get the picture.

"So what does this have to do with writing?" you ask. "I don't see a connection."

My response to that is, "Are you looking?"

Writing in the hopes of getting published has a lot of parallels to customer service. The differences are, of course, obvious. A writer has more creative impulse surely, and spends most of the time actually spent working alone. However, a writer is walking a fine line between competing forces. If she has an agent, she hopes to please the agent and the agent's understanding of the market. She also must pay close attention to the wishes of her publisher, who obviously provides a critical function; and to her fans, who read her work and therefore should probably be pleased by it. Theoretically, all of these visions match, but theory and practice are rarely equivalent. And if you thought that the writer was only juggling these three forces, reality check: she also must preserve the nature of her work. The writer is the vessel by which the work makes its way into the world. She breathes life into the characters, but she also has to make them readable and do her best to make the reading process possible by exposing them to the rest of the humble denizens of our planet. It's a lot to balance, and so much of it depends on not only the writer's discretion, but also her ability to keep others happy - or at least, not pissed off enough to stop representing her. And sometimes, that means getting walked on a bit - but sometimes, it means denying passage, too. Who said the bridge was powerless, after all?