Audience

I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of an “audience,” especially for writing. I loved to sing when I was a kid, but I would always get stage fright singing in front of someone else. Similarly, I didn’t like showing my writing to a lot of other people, because then they would inevitably judge it and make me feel self-conscious. I thought that I could just write for myself and never need to think about an audience. But as much as I love writing only for myself, I tend to do most of my writing for school- either papers for a teacher, or posts on this blog. Teachers are definitely an audience; which of us can truly say they’ve never specifically written some part of an assignment with exactly their teacher’s preferences in mind? However, I never thought much about audience until I began to write this blog.

When I saw on our class syllabus that we were required to write a blog, my first thought was of audience. I would be putting my writing out on the internet for everyone to see- not only my classmates and friends, but potentially complete strangers who would know nothing about me. Nothing but what I told them, and what they discerned through my writing. That was kind of frightening to me. How did I write to them? What kind of audience were they? I had literally no idea. Really, I still don’t. Mostly, right now, my audience is my classmates and my teacher. I have somewhat of an idea of how to write for them- write to the rubric for my teacher, write something interesting and funny for my classmates to comment on. That’s about as much consideration as I ever put into my audience, at least until we started talking about it in class.

We read two articles, “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction” and “Closing My Eyes As I Speak”. In the second one, the writer (Peter Elbow) discussed how audiences, whether they’re imagined or right in front of us, can often distract or confuse our writing. That has often been the case with me. I wrote a short story for my younger sisters once, and it was jumbled and confusing because I didn’t know how to write to them or what they’d like to read. Since audiences were hard for me to write to, I usually ignored them altogether and just wrote for myself. However, that won’t always be possible. if I continue with my dream of wanting to be an author, audience will become a much more important thing to me. They’re the people who will read my books, critique them, edit them, decide if they’re good enough to be sold, buy them, etc. I will need to deliberately write something they would like to read, otherwise I won’t be able to publish or profit off of my work.

As much as a writer can choose to write for themselves, an author doesn’t have that privilege. And if that’s what I’m planning to be, I’ll need to start putting much more thought into my audience than I do currently.