How do you write what people actually want to read?

I don’t.

That sounds irresponsible. Maybe a little self-destructive, given the economics of the thing. But it’s the truth, and I’ve decided the truth is worth more than the alternative.

I don’t sit down and ask what does the audience want. What’s trending. What paragraph gets shared. What topic will make the algorithm roll over and show me its belly like a dog that’s learned the trick pays off.

That’s marketing.

I’m trying to write.

There’s a difference, and the difference is the whole point.

Most of the time I write for myself.

I write because something happened and it keeps rattling around in my skull, refusing to settle, demanding to be dealt with on the page.

A road. A photograph. A bad memory. A strange conversation. A river. A dead friendship. A mountain at sunrise. Some lunatic asking about chemtrails at seven in the morning on a lookout tower I climbed in the dark to reach.

Whatever it is — if it keeps scratching at the inside of the skull like something that wants out — I write it down.

Then I try to make it interesting.

That’s the Gonzo part.

You take the ordinary and lean into it until the weirdness starts showing through the seams. You tell the truth, but you tell it with teeth. You let your actual personality into the room instead of standing politely outside it. You admit when you were wrong. You admit when you were tired or pissed off or scared or high or lost or confused or completely out of your depth standing in front of two armed ranchers asking questions about mutilated cattle.

You stop pretending the writer is some invisible machine hovering neutrally above the story, taking notes from a safe altitude.

You are in the damn story.

That’s what makes it alive instead of just accurate.

I think the mistake people make is trying too hard to write something everyone will like.

The second you do that, you start sanding off everything sharp. Everything weird. Everything specific enough to actually be yours. And eventually you’re left holding something polished and safe and completely forgettable — technically correct, structurally sound, and dead on arrival.

I would rather write something honest that ten people genuinely connect with than something empty that ten thousand people scroll past on their way to the next thing.

If people want to read it, great.

If they laugh, even better.

If they see a little of themselves in one of my stories, then somehow the whole experiment worked and I got away with something.

But I cannot chase that.

The moment I start trying to predict what everybody wants, I stop sounding like myself. The voice goes generic. The specific details get filed down into the kind of universal mush that’s supposed to appeal to everyone and ends up meaning nothing to anyone.

So I write the way I photograph.

I pay attention.

I wait for something worth noticing.

I frame it the way I actually see it — not the way I think it should be framed for an audience I’ve never met and can’t predict.

Then I hit the shutter.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

But at least it’s mine.