Your Niche is Looking for You

Kick back, keep writing and it will find you

If you’ve been reading anything on Medium for the past twenty-five minutes, you’re well aware of the plethora of advice for writers that exists here. Personally, I find it boring AF.

One particularly tiresome nugget that gets re-mined by each shiny-eyed new writer on the platform is: Find Your Niche and Stick to it or You Won’t Succeed. The conventional wisdom is that by establishing your territory you will build an audience hanging on your every word about that corner you’ve claimed as your own.

I paid about as much attention to that as I do any of the dozens of “helpful” advice articles out there desperately seeking engagement by offering “solutions” and “value”. I ignored it.

After decades of writing, submitting, having the very occasional piece published, and developing an impressive array of rejections, I found this haven where I can write about anything that interests me and publish it. Immediately, I also found myself inundated with fingers shaking in my face instructing me to do this, but don’t do that, and for God’s sake never do that.

Like I’ve ever done what I’m supposed to

Maybe you’re different. Maybe you’re a good little Doobie who earnestly takes advice and implements it. Good for you! I probably won’t be reading what you write, but good for you anyway.

Me, I am constitutionally disinclined to do anything anyone suggests even if it’s something that I may want to do anyway. You can just imagine the grief this attitude has caused me and those near and dear to me. Even so, when I read that I should find my niche and stick to it I laughed and tossed that aside. I’ll write whatever the hell I want to write, Helpful Writers of Medium. Go niche yourselves.

It has to be said that when I first began publishing on Medium I did, in fact, have a niche that I’d been studiously sticking to for some fifteen or so years. I began writing fiction as a kid and by the time I found this platform I had files and files of stories. Some finished. Some actually published (even internationally). Some still in progress. I really loved one of my earliest stories, “A Good Deep Hole”, but it had been rejected countless times over the years. I wrote about receiving badly needed validation from a dear friend and fellow writer in this piece:

I’ve published nearly all of my best fiction on Medium. The Nonconformist, Literally Literary, The London Literary Review, and The Narrative have all offered friendly homes to my stories. I am in their debt. However, fiction has a rough time attracting attention anywhere, Medium included. One of my most viewed pieces of fiction has earned less than five dollars and managed a 50% read ratio.

Once I’d exhausted my store of previously written fiction, I tried an experiment in January that was eerily prescient of our current situation. If my crystal ball and tarot cards had been more reliable I might not have opted for writing a short, fictional obituary each day of that month. But my powers of prediction are rusty and so I went for it. As you may suspect, those didn’t really hit any hot spots but it was a solid muscle-building exercise and I’m glad now that I took it on.

Having pushed myself to do that, I am taking a fiction-writing sabbatical. Medium readers don’t make it worth the time and effort good fiction writing demands and besides, over the course of some 17 months of writing and 5 months of daily writing, it’s happened.

My niche finally found me. I should say my niches because life is too short to stick to one area of interest.

It’s not repetition, it’s a niche dammit

Until recently (like about an hour ago), I was getting a little worried about my preoccupation with societal disintegration, death, and the ways we as a species are self-destructing. Am I repeating myself? Will I turn into that dotty old great-aunt in the corner who has been telling the same family story all evening?

I’m pleased to announce that reports of my dottiness are premature. This is simply a case of one of my niches finally finding me and it’s taken me months to realize it. See what I was writing over a year ago?

From then until yesterday’s submission, I’ve lost count of how many essays I’ve written about our bad habits and where they’ve gotten us. The nice thing about this particular niche is that I know I can always count on us to keep adding to the pile, well, until it really does collapse. Until then I’ll have plenty of material, won’t I?

Several other niches have been wandering the lonely desert looking for me and in the past month or so I’ve opened my eyes to the fact I’d been adhering to their insistence that I write within their confines over and over. I didn’t even know!

Here are a few:

• Work
• New York
• Burning Man
• Death
• Family
• Defying societal expectations
• Ignoring any and all “helpful” advice for writers on Medium

You may note that none of these are ones that the soothsayers assure us will goose engagement and earn me a boatload of money. What can I say? I’m just not drawn to being viral (make of that what you will). In short, I can’t be bothered trying to divine what my readers really want to tear into and so I don’t. I write where the juice is for me. If you like it, awesome. If not, so what?

I’m not above providing helpful advice, however, even if it’s never going to be a niche that finds me.

So, relax. Keep writing whatever gets your fingers flying. Write the stuff you like to read. Do it with joy and consistency. Trust me, there is a niche out there looking for you. That determined little sucker will find you the more you write.

That’s as much helpful advice as you’re going to get from me. Now get to work.

© Remington Write 2020. All Rights Reserved.