Chase Trends; Lose Your Voice

I am not a bestselling author, and that’s okay.

Of course, like every writer, I’d love to see my name on a bestseller list. I’d love the validation. I’d love the reach. But it’s not something I actively pursue. Why? Because I’d rather stay true to my voice than write whatever happens to be popular this year. I have no shame in that.

Every few years, something new comes along. Zombies. Supernatural romance. Dystopia. One breakout book hits, and publishers suddenly fill shelves with variations on the same idea. When The Hunger Games took off, there was a flood of similar stories. When Harry Potter exploded, it spawned a thousand clones. That’s just how publishing works.

But here’s the problem: if you chase trends, you will never catch up. What you will do, almost without noticing, is lose your own voice. It won’t happen all at once.

At first, it feels harmless. You tweak your work a little because someone says your horror needs more blood. Your romance should have more sex. Your sci-fi doesn’t have enough aliens. You listen to feedback, even when it comes from people who aren’t remotely qualified to give it. They may mean well, but they’re thinking “trends.” So you adjust a few things here and there. Not because they feel right, but because someone told you it was.

What ultimately happens? You stop trusting your own voice. That’s the real danger. Trend chasing teaches writers to distrust their own instincts.

Your voice is not a style choice. It’s not just sentence structure, or word selection, or tone. Your voice is how you see the world. It’s your opinions, your obsessions, your curiosities, your fears. Your experiences shape your voice. It’s what you notice and what you care about.

You can copy style. You can try to “write like” Robert B. Parker or Nora Roberts or Dean Koontz. But you cannot write in their voice. Any attempt to do so will always feel artificial, because it is.

The books that last, the ones people remember, the ones that become classics: they didn’t come from trend chasing. They came from voice.

William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist. The book initially went nowhere. It didn’t sell. It looked like a failure. Then someone made a movie out of it. The movie became a hit, and suddenly Blatty had a bestseller. Along with that came a wave of exorcism novels.

None of them came close to his. Why? Because Blatty wrote from his voice. The others were writing toward a market.

Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire. The book’s success led to bookstores being packed with vampire novels. Most fell flat. Rice wasn’t following a trend. She was writing something deeply personal, strange, and intimate. The copycats were just chasing momentum. Most of them failed.

Robert Parker wrote crime fiction in a genre that was already crowded. But his Spenser novels worked because they sounded like Parker. Not because he chased a trend. They worked because his unique voice carried them.

We start writing because we have stories inside us that we want to tell. Writing is exploration: of the world, of people, of ourselves. It isn’t product development. It isn’t reverse-engineering whatever happens to be selling. If it’s meant to be authentic, it should never be. When you let trends drive your creative choices, writing becomes transactional. You stop asking what matters to you and start asking what might sell. Once that happens, your work loses its pulse and becomes hollow. Then you wonder why you feel burned out and why writing is suddenly harder. Your work becomes shallow.

Trends come and go. They always have. They always will. Your voice is the only thing that’s actually yours. It stays with you for life.

I’m not a bestselling author, and if I never am, I’m okay with it. What I am is an authentic one. I write what I want, in whatever genre I want, and I don’t lose sleep over what’s trendy or whether it fits nicely on a bookstore shelf. I don’t build a platform, or write for an “audience.” It may be unorthodox, but I’m not writing for you. If you read and enjoy my work, of course I’m happy. If my work speaks to you, then I wrote it for you, but I wasn’t thinking about you when I first set it to the page.

When you read my work, you’re not getting a carbon copy of whatever happens to be popular. You’re getting me. For a writer, I think that’s far more rewarding than a bestselling book you never had your heart in.