Why “Write What You Love” Is Only Half the Advice

“Write what you love” is some of the best writing advice you’ll ever hear—and also some of the most incomplete. And with Valentine’s day coming, it seemed an apropos theme for today.

On its own, the advice is freeing. It gives permission. It pushes back against trend-chasing and imitation. It reminds you that the emotional engine of a story has to come from somewhere real, or the work will feel hollow. Writing what you love is often how people begin, and for many, it’s how they keep going when the work gets hard.

But it’s only half the advice.

The other half is this: once your work leaves your desk, it enters a conversation—with readers, editors, markets, and expectations that exist whether you acknowledge them or not. Ignoring that reality doesn’t make your writing purer. It just means you may not understand why it lands the way it does.

Writing what you love answers the question why you write. Audience answers the question who it’s for.

Those questions don’t always have the same answer.

Sometimes the thing you most want to write is deeply personal, formally strange, or uninterested in accessibility. It may resist clear genre labels. It may care more about texture than plot, or mood more than resolution. There is nothing wrong with that. Art for art’s sake is not a failure mode—it’s a valid, necessary one.

But when you choose that path, it helps to be honest about the trade-off: you may be writing for an audience of one.

That doesn’t mean the work lacks value. It means its success criteria are internal. Did it say what you needed it to say? Did it explore the question that mattered to you? Did it feel true? If so, it succeeded—regardless of whether anyone else ever reads it.

Problems arise when writers hold contradictory expectations. When they write entirely for themselves, but measure success by publication. Or when they submit work without considering whether the editor they’re sending it to is even looking for the kind of experience the story offers.

Learning where your work actually lands is not selling out. It’s information.

Editors aren’t gatekeepers of quality so much as curators of fit. A rejection often isn’t saying “this isn’t good,” but “this doesn’t belong here.” Over time, paying attention to those patterns—what gets personal notes, what gets form rejections, what gets accepted—teaches you how your work is being read by people who aren’t you.

That knowledge gives you agency. You can choose to adjust, to aim your work more deliberately, or to continue writing exactly what you love with clear eyes about the outcome.

The mistake isn’t loving your work too much. The mistake is pretending that love alone determines where it will land.

So yes—write what you love. Absolutely. Just don’t stop there.

Decide whether you’re writing for yourself, for readers, or for editors. Decide whether you’re making art, building a career, or trying—carefully—to do both. None of those choices are wrong.

But clarity about which game you’re playing makes every other decision easier.