Dear Critics: We Write what we Want

Over at Chris Brecheen's Writing about Writing, a controversy about writing and J.K. Rowling and a  critic who told her to stop writing Harry Potter.

First we're going to ask a question of ourselves and then answer it.

Why do we write?

Easy, we get an idea and think it would be cool to turn it into a novel. This gets us into a lot of trouble. World War 1990 was supposed to be one book. One. But the ideas just keep coming. Hmmm...Cuba...hmmm...The Netherlands...

And so we make that idea happen.

Besides, the WW1990 books sell. If you think we're working on books focused on a single nation to break into that nation's market, well, that's we're you're right...Esercito Italian...NL...

Israel Strikes did so well we wrote a sequel, which also sells.

Brecheen lays it down for critics:

First of all, JK Rowling doesn't write for other people. She loves her fans, but you can't rightly say that she writes for them. She doesn't write for her editors. She doesn't write for her critics. She doesn't write for money. She certainly doesn't write for the careers of upstart writers such as yourself.

Rowling writes for the same reason writers have written since the dawn of language. Because our soul burns to write and without it we would die. She writes because in a very real way, she doesn't have a choice. She sits down for eight to twelve hours a day (according to her own interviews) and creates something with the same impetus that drives artists the world over.

In the end, we write for ourselves. There just happens to be a lot of people like us who want to read the books we want to write because we write what we want to read.

This is how and why we wrote our first novel, begun with a sudden overwhelming drive to create: