Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Well, you can do it one of two ways, I think. You can write popular entertainment for the masses, as Dickens and Shakespeare did, and be lucky enough to have future generations judge your work to be great literature. Or perhaps you're someone like Virginia Woolf, who regarded writing as "Art-with-a-capital-A" and certainly didn't care whether or not the unwashed masses ever read it.
Either way, the future will judge whether or not your work is great literature.
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This. Marketing and Target Audiences mean nothing as far as the importance, quality, or impact of the work. As far as I'm concerned the most important thing is for the writer (fiction/poetry/etc, not non-fiction) to be in touch with themselves, their demons, their muse and why they are writing. Art and Meaning, not Entertainment and Sales.
(The important points are much different for non-fiction or targeted commercial works - particularly for the mass market)