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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/46096
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 **CON:**

The reasons to **not write something you wouldn't read** are pretty easy and straightforward:

- You are a stand-in for your potential audience. If even you aren't interested in this idea, that audience may not exist.
- It's hard to do a good job writing something that doesn't engage you.
- If you're writing in a unfamiliar genre, your writing may appear cliched and amateurish to that genre's fans.

**PRO**

In some ways the potential reasons to **push on anyway** are more interesting:

- Not all writing is for publication. This writing may represent important learning for you, or inform your eventual published writing in some important way.
- Not all ideas show all their magic at once --just like not all love is love at first sight. Sometimes the best final product comes from unpromising seeds.
- Some writing --particularly fantasy --can help you personally explore your subconscious, and other internal psychological territory.
- Sometimes an outsider to a genre can bring a fresh new perspective or ideas. It's not unheard of for successful fantasy books to be written by people who don't typically read fantasy.
- If you have a pattern of giving up on all your ideas, then **at some point you need to just push on through with one,** all the way to the end. "Losing interest" can be a symptom of a mental block against completing a writing project.

This needs to be your own choice, but if there's something in this idea you're having trouble letting go of, I'd say **go ahead and explore it** --at least until you feel you've worked through it, and there's nothing more to gain out of it.

Original score: 2