Know Your Audience

An incredibly original article on advice never heard before.

Now here’s where I’m going to parrot something that gets parroted a lot.

Know your audience.

When you sit down to write something, who are you writing it for?

Keep that in mind all the way through the end of the writing process.

But here’s where I’m going to blow your mind. Or try to at least.

Remember when I said “It’s okay to write for yourself?”

Well, WRITE STORIES FOR YOURSELF!

Let me put this in context. I’ve said elsewhere in this book that authors are ARTISTS. Let’s compare us to, say, a painter.

How does a painter get good at painting?

Well, they look at other paintings, first of all.

Then they get the supplies they need.

Then they practice.

And practice.

And practice.

Until finally they reach the point where someone wants to buy their paintings.

And they dream of the day when their crappy early phases are worth something because it has their name on it.

How does this translate into writing?

Ask any artist out there how much they’ve practiced. How many sketches they have to make before they have a finished product. How painstaking the early process is.

How long it was before they earned their first commission.

Authors go through the exact same phases.

All those years I spent writing for myself? I was flexing a muscle.

And when I finally realized “Oh hey I can actually do this,” it was like I’d unlocked a skill in a video game.

I compared writing my first novel to losing my cherry, and I’ll make that comparison again here. But here’s the thing; I’d pretty much given up on being famous when I wrote my first novel. I wasn’t going for the prom queen or the prettiest person in class. I was the ugly girl that got an offer for a pity fuck from someone on the football team and turned them down because I had standards.

Then I waited until I had the skills I thought I needed.

And it turns out that I had over prepared for the situation and when it finally happened I was like “Oh is that all?”

It was still the best thing ever

And the lead-up to it, to realizing that I was actually going to hit that benchmark, it was absolutely amazing.

Nobody will ever see my real first novel. I deleted it.

Then I decided to write another one that I could share with the world and be proud of.

So. Let’s talk about audiences.

If your audience is yourself, then you should get to know yourself.

What sort of things do you like to read?

What sorts of things don’t you like to read?

What do you know?

What do you want to know?

Why are you determined to write something? Is there something driving you to get the thoughts out of your head? Some phrases or conversation that’s echoing in your head that you just can’t let go of?

Get it out. It’s healthy.

Don’t worry about being coherent when you’re writing for yourself.

Don’t worry about structure or plot.

Just get

The

Ideas

OUT.

Now then. If I haven’t driven you off with the crazy routine, let’s talk about what you do if you want to reach an audience beyond yourself.

You get to know them. You join their clubs, you drink their koolaid. You listen to their music and you read the same books as them and watch the same movies.

You learn how they think, and you learn what they want to read.

Then you learn to write the way they like to read.

Like an anthropologist studying the bonobos, the authors walk among us, pretending to be normal while absorbing everything and putting it into their blender to turn into delicious, delicious smoothies at a later date.

…and that’s really it.

I mean, there’s more to it than that. You could get all technical about it and shit. But you don’t have to. You can do ‘market research’ and analysis and studies. Or you can just do what feels right to you.

Personally, I write for myself first and my audience second. I’m going to be reading my writing a dozen times during the reading and editing process anyway, so I ought to like the story, right?

Right?

Right?