The Place That’s Important to You

Martha Wells’s advice cuts against the instinct so many writers carry into a project: the sense that a story has a “correct” destination, dictated by genre convention, market expectations, or what a workshop group says a plot “should” do.

She’s pointing at something quieter and more honest, that the story already has a place it wants to go, one shaped by what actually matters to the person writing it, not by an imagined checklist of where good fiction is supposed to end up. This is easy to feel in her own work: Murderbot doesn’t resolve into a tidy arc of a rogue AI “learning to be human” the way a more predictable story might promise.

“So don’t take your story to the place you think you’re supposed to take it; take it to the place that’s important to you, that feels right to you.”
Martha Wells, author of the Murderbot series

It stays prickly, anxious, and fundamentally itself, finding autonomy on its own terms rather than the ones an audience might expect. That’s the payoff of following Wells’s principle, a story that ends up somewhere specific and alive, rather than somewhere generic and safe. The quote works as much as writing advice as it does as life advice: obligation and expectation will always suggest the “supposed to” path, but the meaningful one is usually the path you’d choose even if no one were watching.