Maxim Monday #6: Know Your Audience? You Sure?

Glen battles the blather. Then offers some.

I’m going to leave the intro from MM #1 pinned here for new readers. For today’s new post, scroll down below the photo:

By way of user’s guide, I’m reprinting a snippet from a post I put up this past spring about teaching writing:

“All those rules we’ve all read...any maxims we’ve stuck to our workspaces or screened on our mugs or chanted like prayers...they’re exactly as good as the last thing they helped you get done. Many of them are brilliant. A few of them are true. All of them are wrong.”

Which is just to say, take these for what they are: encouragement; company; one long-timer’s half-sketched map to his own Writer Island, where he takes the air and scours the woods and abandoned buildings and works the days away and may or may not discover buried treasure and may or may not recognize it if and when he does. Hope they help you find yours.

(Also just to say that I’ve eaten all the words left in the refrigerator. Delicious, of course, so sweet and so cold. But every time I open that door, there seem to be more in there, so you should go and check…)

Sometimes I’ll be taking on or adding to or denying longstanding writing truisms. Sometimes I’ll be offering my own.

Hope at least a few of these, over the course of the year, inspire or prod or spur or enrage you enough to get you back out there and digging. If you have thoughts, share ‘em!

And if you do find inspiration here, and you want to show support, please invite your friends to stop by. Or click this little purple button, if you’re so inclined. Any financial encouragement is of course also welcome and deeply appreciated…

Maxim Monday #5

Know your audience.

Whelp, for starters, so many jokes in the form of questions:

I have an audience?

Wait, there is an audience?

Do I only get one?

Are we talking personally? Isn’t one of the perks—er, costs, I meant costs— of this whole writing gig that I don’t have to…unless I want to…

Know as in Friend, or Follow? Or Influence? Do I Influence? Is there a button for that?

As with most writing maxims that survive and get repeated, this one has some truth in it, I suppose. Or actually, not truth, but use. Even more than most, though, it comes booby-trapped, and with at least as much potential for choking or eviscerating your writing as for helping.

Especially now. But I’ll get to that.

Let’s start with the key implication, which is simply that you should know for whom you’re writing. Right away, implicit in that assumption— before we even get to why—is another one. Or several:

That audiences are distinct from each other. Team Horror. The Romance League. The Grand Old Literature Party (Where We Party Slow). The New Lit Party (Where We Party Only on Our Children’s Birthdays, and Don’t Pretend We Enjoy It, Because Likability Is So Y/A).

That even if you accept that the above distinctions exist, everyone in these groupings wants the same things, from every single thing they read.

That you are capable— no matter what your own artistic impulses or gifts may be— of delivering those things. That the people in these groups will take them from you.

I have trouble with all of this. For starters, even if people do read mostly one thing, I refuse to accept that anyone who reads at all is incapable of loving something else, or immune to the thrill of discovery, which remains one of the sustaining joys of the reading life.

Then there’s the whole question of whether aiming for a specific, preexisting set of effects delivered at a previously agreed upon pace in language taken from an established list is even going to help you meet that goal, let alone wind up with a piece of writing that not only pleases the target demographic but also you.

Look, I’m all about the good, gritty reality, and will resist the mystification of the creative process wherever it’s reasonable to do so. But to pretend there isn’t an unconscious or accidental or, yes, mystical/miraculous element to it— to presume that any memorable or significant piece of art, no matter how commercial or genre-directed, can be created without that— is not only willful but silly. “Inspiration” isn’t your enemy, and it isn’t an extra; it’s the thing readers in any genre, throughout time, seem most to agree they want.

It’s also the thing that’s going to keep you writing. That started you writing in the first place. Ignore or suppress at your peril.

Which brings us back to the current moment, and the specific dangers this smug little catchphrase now presents. At Amazon, at the studios, at the agencies, almost certainly at the last, staggering publishing Goliaths as well, there’s a whole new team of professionals in play, dedicated to guiding your writing. Steering, shaping, and yes, controlling it. For your own financial good, they’d say, and terrifyingly, they might not be wrong, if only because the industry’s entire machinery has been diverted to their service. To making the promise self-fulfilling.

Call them Team Algorithm. What they do— scene by scene, character by character, word by word— is comb the metadata for a record of what the majority of readers have previously liked. Meaning bought, or paid for. Then retro-engineer new art to replicate those experiences. Turn I into AI until the A is all the way ready to take over the whole process (which it never will be). Infuse art with a Larger Purpose that is pre-programmed into it, so that it serves its societal function, which in our case is Making Money.

Call it Capitalist Realist.

Art as park bench. As mutual fund. Dubious one.

To be clear, I not only have nothing against making money from my writing, I have committed my professional life to it. But deleting that possessive pronoun…I can’t. And yeah, even if it turns out I can, I won’t.

As always, though, if you can shrug off all of that implication baggage and drill down to the words as I suspect they were originally intended, there is indeed usefulness there. Help, even, if employed properly. Here’s how:

Know there is an audience, because that will help you keep the writing turned outward. Help you focus on making what you’ve dreamed sing to someone else.

Imagine who that audience might be, not as types, but faces. Imagine actual people reading what you’ve done.

Imagine the response you hope your work triggers on those faces.

Then make your words do that.