Everyone knows that readers have subject preferences. Not everyone will like a story even if it is very well written. It is not literary failure if someone doesn’t like your story because they don’t like that kind of story. It is failure if a reader normally likes the kind of story you wrote, but doesn’t like yours. They don’t have a beef with the editing or the grammar or the genre or even the idea of the story—they just did not like what you wrote or the way you wrote it.
Where most writing fails, it does so because the original idea of the story the author wished to convey to the reader gets lost in translation.
Remember that writing is one form of communication. There are four parts to communication in writing: Continue reading “A Failure to Communicate”