One piece of advice you'll see popping up in various forms is how to write for an audience. How about we start with an audience of one: You.
I'm a selfish writer. I write for myself for fun before I consider doing anything for an audience. With only two television stations to entertain us growing up, it shouldn't be a huge surprise I ended up writing to pass the time. I spent most of my high school life with my head inconveniently in the clouds, far more than in books, be they school books or my own. Somehow, I graduated and managed to go to university to hone my skills as an author.
Even if my story wasn't what they were looking for, my characters have been described as believable, and my stories a very dialogue driven. While Stephen and Grace of Live to Tell are going through the motions of deciding if their marriage is worth continuing, they're not resorting to childish antics to get their way. The narrative tests their strengths and patience, especially with their daughter being threatened by the main antagonist, Renata, and they're not entirely out of the woods by the end, but are much closer to understanding one another. With Into the Other, I didn't want to present two typical teens in Ralla and Seth. Seth is into dirt bikes and D&D, and he might be sullen, but he's stuck in a crisis finding out the truth about his past. Ralla is stuck between two worlds, the Other and the Concrete, but has no firm footing in either. She challenges her captor, Calder, and demands he show her more of the Concrete world. She's tenacious and restless, and capable of holding her own. A memorable character will be the one who breaks the mould and resonates with the audience.
What I sent them was intended for a wider audience. But when I was writing for a particular market, and trying to break in while certain genres were popular, I was told I shouldn't pander to anyone when it came to my work. When I wrote for myself, with ideas I'd come up with, my writing was more honest and original. It was almost a curse to come up with a new concept that had no selling potential. Yet how are readers supposed to discover new worlds and ideas if publishers only want the same old thing?
I recently finished reading the Lost Version of one of my favourite books, The Last Unicorn. Peter Beagle had this released with a very interesting forward, and an afterword that is valuable in itself for any author. Coming up with this as his second novel, he had to get past many mental obstacles and needed a huge amount of encouragement to finish, but his original idea was very different. The Lost Version is incomplete, you're left with an intense cliffhanger, and the unicorn encounters vastly different characters. It was even set in a completely different time entirely, and wasn't intended as a fairy tale. It certainly wouldn't have been made into an animated film! Beagle accepted this tale wasn't going to ever finish, there was something larger for another author to tackle. But he still ended with an incredibly beautiful, very human fairy tale. Sometimes certain tales can't be finished. I knew there was something in my original story, a kernel that could be expanded in a better way, with richer characters and infinitely more description. I'm really glad I got around to turning something relatively small and flawed into something larger and much more polished. He persisted because his family wanted to know more about the unicorn, and he admitted had they not, he'd probably never have finished the version I've come to know and love.
Never let a blank page frighten you, though. One of my heroes, Dan Harmon, tells writers to just write something, even if it's generally nonsensical, because it's better than staring at a blank cursor. Putting pressure on yourself to have a perfect masterpiece the first time around is what trips a lot of potential authors up from the start. Don't worry if your paragraphs aren't polished to perfection, or you've got a few holes in your story here and there. An imperfect first draft is always better than a blank page with a blinking cursor.
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