Pop onto a writing forum. Look for a discussion on how best to do X. Count the posts until someone says something to the effect of "well, this is what's best to do for the readers". This is what readers like, this is what they understand, what they' expect, and so on.
If you got as far as ten, you're not using the same forums as me, that's for sure.
This is probably a good tendency. The point of writing is communication and communication works due to shared understanding of concepts. The stronger the understanding is, the more effective the communication.
However, as with all attempts to find out what people want, there is a big problem and that is the notorious inability of the people to reveal what they actually want.
I recently confronted this in myself when reading The Traitor God by Cam Johnston. Normally, I'd tell you I like action-adventure books. But when the book wrapped up its mystery early in favour of a big fight, I thought it the most disappointing decision that Cam made in writing it.
So do I like action-adventure with lots of fighting, or not? Maybe its sudden shifts in terms of the emphasis of the entertainment I dislike - it's not the first fantasy mystery book I've had this problem with. But in general, I'd say I like authors to try and do this. Kushiel's Dart switches very smoothly between intrigue and a desperate flight for survival. Numerous Feist books career all over the place.
It appears that I can either like or dislike these pitch shifts within books. I can't tell would-be authors to do it or not to do it. As I think about it, the most I can offer is "Just get it right". But I can't tell you what right is, I'll just know it when I see it.
I often refer to this as Goldilocks syndrome. There's pieces of writing craft where the judgment of the end results will be so subjective and so varied, where there's popular books at opposite poles of approach, that there's not a lot of useful advice to do other than "Just get it right". Which isn't very helpful, but its more helpful than some of the advice about what readers like and don't like out there.
Take exposition. I tell people that I buck the seeming tend and that I enjoy a lot of exposition. But I know there's been plenty of Amazon samples I've put them down because they've got too much to begin with. Am I telling the truth, or is there something else in play? Maybe its just that the exposition at the front comes before I'm interested (I think C.S. Pacat sums up neatly where exposition should come here) but honestly, I think Moraine's recounting of Manerethen's fall in The Eye of the World is where I got hooked.
Or take my recent attempt to try and figure out why I like a big message in some books and not others. Or take just about anything.
People will point at sales figures and say what is popular, is what people like. I find that hard to argue with and equally hard to come up with a coherent pattern of what readers want from what is popular. The two totem poles of popular fantasy today are Harry Potter and A Song Of Ice And Fire and in a lot of ways, they're pretty damn opposite. If I had to pick a third biggest contemporary author, I'd probably say Gaiman, who's kinda off out there on another axis. And you can probably pick out most of the "You don't want to do that" rules that writers hear getting broken in one or another of their books.
In fact, the only commonality I can see is that all of them were perceived as doing something fresh and new and different from the market. "Same But Different" is one of the great guidelines for being hyper popular.
And as such, what guidelines can we offer in terms of what people want - when people themselves often fail to express what they want?
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