I agree wholeheartedly with John on this issue - that you ought just to write about what interests you and try not to worry about what anyone else might think of it.

For another thing, it seems to me that when people write/talk about what interests them, it's just about always more interesting to others than if they were writing/talking about something else. It's a sense of animation or conviction or genuineness on the part of the speaker/writer that can sometimes create the interest more than the actual information being conveyed.

Often I read stories peopled by characters I would never really want to meet, but they become appealing to me in the stories because of the writers' interest in them and the particular ways in which they're portrayed.

The interests of others (that you don't at first share) can sometimes be contagious. Another example - I went to my first baseball game last season at Candlestick Park because of my neighbors' interest in the sport. I had always been a bit cynical about professional sports although tried to keep an open mind about them - certainly there were interests of mine that the neighbors might find pointless and dull, like the rocks I retrieved from various jaunts around the countryside and insisted on showing them, or my monologues on what internal conflicts might really be going on inside the minds of their cats when they appeared to be focused on stalking wildlife in the back yard. So they'd put up with me and it seemed important to them that I go to the game but I wasn't looking forward to it.

Houston was playing the Giants. They spent the preceding week prepping me on why I hated Houston - the rednecks, the drawl, the cowboy hats. I was supposed to come up with a few of my own reasons. The weather, I said, and the landscape. Try harder, they said - be brutal. At any rate, their enthusiasm never flagged and got to be contagious. At the game, I booed, I cheered, ate hotdogs, drank beer, in a way I hadn't thought was in me to do.

There was something kind of magical about the energy of the crowd and the grace with which the players ran and manipulated the ball. Maybe this hasn't made a true fan out of me but at least it opened me up to something I hadn't understood at all before. I'm no longer left feeling so alienated by the sports pages in the newspaper, now I have a way to make a stab at conversation with the men at work with whom I have nothing else in common.

Sorry for the digression, but maybe you'll know what I mean.