My son, Jake, is working on his first novel and asked me if I would edit his work.  As mentioned before, I hate editing, but what kind of mother tells her child no?  Do you know what I discovered, though?  I LOVE editing other people’s work!  I love getting out my figurative red pen and marking grammar errors and incomplete sentences.  I inserted the word “why?” no less than a dozen times into his manuscript.  Why did your character say that?  Why did that happen?  Why, why, why?  The one thing that I told him that I would not critique, however, is whether or not the book is “good.”  Here was my advice for him:  Write what you like.  Write what you know.  Write want you want to read.  Write what feels good.  If you worry about appealing to the masses, then you have put yourself in a place where you really don’t want to be as an artist.  Appeal to yourself.  Write a book that you pull off of the shelf and read again and again, simply because you like it.  Sure, we want others to like it, too.  We all have that dream of making it big—-writing the Great American novel that everyone wants to read.  If that is your sole motivation, though, the book isn’t coming from your heart.  Ambition is a fine quality but it has no place during the creative process.