Stop saying "Write whatever you want"!

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So called YA writing is, for the most part, boring, unspeakably depressing and violent and badly written. It gives me a headache reading those formulaic blurbs.

I guess I should point out the shortcomings of the other end of the spectrum too: when people try too hard to be different and end up writing the most boring, precocious cluster of words imaginable. Think of it this way: if you paint a picture of a human being and do it well, that's something everyone can appreciate. Even people who have no real love for painting (like me) can at least look at it and tell that it's done well. But then we have "artists" who go around doing the most insane things imaginable, like scattering trash across the floor or filling a giant fish bowl with beach balls, and then calling it "art". Who appreciates that? Only the artist. Why? Because it's too different, so much that it only holds any form of meaning to the artist. Everyone else just scratches their heads and walk away, wondering what the hell they just saw. It might stick in their mind because of how outlandish it was ("Dude, remember that guy who was sculpting duck bills out of mashed peas? LOL!) , but not for the reasons that the artist should want them to remember it for.

I see that all the time in these writing forums as well. People saying, "Hey, read my book! It's DIFFERENT!" Okay, what's so good about it? "Well... it's not like the others." But what makes it better? "You've never read a book like this before." Is it different in an enjoyable way? "It's different, okay?!"

Too many of those books read like those stupid exercises they use, purportedly, to help people get through writer's
block. They tell you not to worry about spelling, grammar and the like. Most of these authors should stay blocked.

When it comes down to it, you can focus on :

1) Writing for pleasure.

2) Writing what's profitable or to publish.

The latter is easily researched, and not everything needs to appeal to everyone or be written with the goal of publishing in mind. Many works which are popular are viewed as not actually being very good, and many works which are classics were ignored in their own time. So it's a lot more complex.

Many new writers fret aimlessly over how "good" or "unique" their ideas are before doing any work. No one can say whether or not an idea will hold up well or sell until it's a book or at least a very good outline. Notice they rarely ask for tips on making a character less of a Mary Sue, how to improve dialogue, or anything like that, just whether or not their ideas are "good" or "unique" enough.

Many people like things which follow certain themes and formulas. Things like the romance genre in particular fulfills certain fantasies that people don't want authors to get too creative about, or it no longer acts as wish fulfillment or is exciting in the right ways. So it doesn't matter if ideas have been done there because people read it specifically for those things.

No amount of nitpicking over how unique and potentially profitable an idea is will turn a new writer from someone who's never even written a short story into a bestseller overnight. Better to get it over with and finish some not-perfect ideas and learn how to actually write through the process of trial and error.

But people are afraid to just do the work of not being good at first. They try to shortcut by finding a "perfect" idea that everyone else approves of. When they really should just be writing.

What Canary said is absolutely right and eloquently stated.

I write space opera SF currently and the majority of what sells is retreading older ideas with a few new twists. The stuff I've done that was more original never sold as well (and I had a protagonist in my first series that was very ASD with lots of social and sensory issues which apparently led a lot of readers to dislike him).

Romance books of any kind, any subgenre of romance, are a minefield for authors unless you devour and love romance books of that particular type yourself. There are reams of unwritten rules on everything from what job or color hair the hero can have to what words you can and can't use in sex scenes. I tried doing some SF romances and failed miserably, even if I had fun trying. I like romance and having romances in my stories--but the romance GENRE is a different and very picky beast.

I don't have a problem with their plots sounding similar to other books. There is nothing new under the sun, after all. What bugs me is when they describe their book, and it's like, "The MC's an orphan living with his evil relatives, and then he finds out he's the son of an ancient Greek god and he has to go learn magic so he can destroy an evil ring and kill the bad guy."

And trust me, there's a lot of that.

I'm doing "the work of not being good at first" right now. I'm co-writing an urban fantasy novel with a friend. This is the first sustained bit of fiction writing I've done in two decades. I put my all into the sections I write, try to make them as good as I possibly can- while accepting that my writing is a long way off publication standard still. (I think the fact that it's a collaboration helps- we keep going because at least we're entertaining each other!)

Occasionally, sucessful writers will let slip exactly how much work they had to put in before their first saleable book. In Kameron Hurley's acknowledgements in "Empire Ascendant," she says, "...this is the fifth book I've published and the fourteenth I've written...."