Who's Your Audience?

            Whenever you sit down to write, you have an intended audience.  Even if you’re just venting for mental health, your audience is you.  And it’s important  that you remember your intended target.

            The best audience, of course, is yourself.  You shouldn’t write artificial claptrap you think will please someone else.  As long as you’re true to your own voice and story, that’s enough.  Writing a stiff, formal essay because your teacher likes those is a painful sellout, something you shouldn’t do once you get the grade and get out of there.  Unless that’s actually your style, in which case you shouldn’t budge from it no matter how many people urge you to be edgy and modern.  There’s an audience for every style if it’s done well, and let’s face it: Where would Downton Abbey be were it not for restrained formality?

            Writing for a teacher or a publisher who wants horror or fantasy or whatever else, is not going to be as fulfilling as writing what you love in your heart (and, again, that might be horror or fantasy). 

So I’m going to give you two messages today.  One is to write only for yourself, and the other is to write commercial stuff that sells.  Is it contradictory?  Not as much as you might think. 

First of all, you have to write material you can be proud of.  Not schlock, even if that’s what sells.  I couldn’t write erotic bodice rippers if it meant saving my house—I’d move into smaller digs first.  That’s because I’m LDS and I have standards I’ve chosen to keep at all costs.  That’s a bar I’ve set, a personal vow I’ve made.  You have standards, too—maybe you’d feel ashamed if you wrote sitcoms.  Or corny material that only amuses adolescent boys.  Or formula stuff with the token chase scene, the token karate scene, the token sex scene.  To you, that’s not quality literature.  Everybody has their own self-imposed limitations.

At the end of the day, you cannot be ashamed of your work.  You must feel you are leaving behind something of worth, something you can put your real name on.  Something your kids can read.  But, having said that, you must be able to bend and adapt—still keeping your standards—yet be willing to modify your work to suit its buyers.  If an agent or an editor tells you to change your character’s name or profession, don’t be a ridiculous crybaby and refuse to do it.  Be someone people can work with, who isn’t so wedded to every word in their manuscript that they can’t cut a single phrase.

This also means being willing to take on something that has a buyer, even if it’s not your favorite genre or your signature style.  This flexibility is often the difference between selling and starving.  Yes, you keep your basic standards, and you remember the things you refuse to do (glorifying drug use or violence, for example).  But you keep an open mind about the rest.  If you were an architect of palatial homes are you telling me you’d really turn down a lucrative, boxy shopping mall just because it wasn’t artsy enough for you?  C’mon.  Be willing to write a Western, a mystery, a spy theme, a cookbook, a children’s princess story.  Like the best actors, the best writers take on challenges that make them stretch and grow.  Oh, yeah, and challenges that get them paying jobs, too.