I cannot count and wouldn’t even want to try counting how many times I’ve asked someone in a workshop to write something — and they haven’t. They’ve written something else instead.

If I’d said this to you last week, I’d have said it is always fantastic, it is always an absolute thrill. I can think of writers where even as I ask them to do something, I am secretly willing them to write something different, just to see what they come up with.

Today, I will say exactly the same. But I didn’t appreciate until this week that it is fantastic and thrilling for a really key reason I hadn’t even noticed.

It’s because, in all these workshops and with all these writers, their intention is solely to write well. Nobody is ignoring me just to be rude, nobody is dismissing my ideas, it’s just that what I’ve said has somehow sparked off something else and they have to write it, they have to.

There is no possible way that any of this could be anything less than joyously wonderful.

But.

These writers also know that they can do it. We’re practically playing in a workshop, they’re not commissioned, they don’t have a real deadline behind my giving them either ten minutes or until I get bored watching them write.

They also know, just as I do, that plenty of times what they write won’t work, somehow just won’t work out. And part of being a writer is knowing when to throw something away.

But then a thing came up this week about writing outside workshops, a thing which I suppose was also about ignoring everyone and writing your own thing, your own way, but it wasn’t joyous.

It was amateur.

I may be overthinking this, could be overreacting, but a writer basically wanted you to know he is a rebel. He didn’t say it, didn’t use that word, but the implication and the thrust of it all was that he’s a rebel writer, and though you or I ordinary people are not, that’s fine, that’s fine, not everyone can be rebellious, it’s not our fault that we aren’t as good as him.

No, I’m going too far there. I’d best step away from what he said because I’m being unfair, I got all of that from a word or two in a long piece that I happened to disagree with.

Let me ignore him, then, and instead focus on this amateur versus professional point of mine. What he put me in mind of is the opinion that the reason a given writer is not published is that publishers have closed ranks, that readers just don’t get him — it’s usually a him — and that ultimately he’s an undiscovered genius.

Could be.

Isn’t.

But could be.

The idea is that therefore, any writer who is discovered, who is published, has bowed to the system, has given in, is writing what the masses like.

The trouble is, you can’t do that. You cannot set out to write what the masses will like because you are wrong, you are always wrong. By the time you’ve written it and it’s been published, the masses have long moved on to something else.

Unless you’re writing about zombies, which for some unfathomable reason just will not go away. I’ve begged.

But say it is possible to somehow write what the masses like, say you can catch just the right fad or something and you can deliver what the publishing industry wants. You’re then exactly the same as every other writer who manages to do that and then there is exactly zero reason why you should be read instead of them.

You can’t and shouldn’t even try to write what you think readers will like. You and I could have a very serious coffee trying to figure out the line here, but I also hesitate about editing the way readers tell you to. I can think of a book I relished where the first three chapters were dreadful, because those were the ones that had been workshopped.

Yet despite all of this, I don’t believe you can ignore the audience. You can’t aim at them, you can’t change to suit an imaginary audience in the hope of getting a real one. But writing is not for writers, it is for readers and if they are not in your mind in some way, I think your writing becomes self-indulgent.

There are a thousand reasons to write just for yourself, with no thought of publication, and yet even then, if I do that I still have to point the writing toward an audience because otherwise I’ll just meander along aimlessly.

Okay, I’m writing to you right now and you may yet think I’m meandering.

I’m trying to find a sentence I can write here that begins “But”.

Anyway.

I don’t believe writing for an audience means giving in to the system. I do believe you have to write for yourself, but you have to do it with the intention that there will be a reader at the end.

I like the sound of being a rebel writer. I think writers have to be rebellious.

It’s just that if you regard yourself as a rebel simply because you’re not published, because the world doesn’t understand you, then you’re not a rebel writer, you’re probably just a shit one.