An Anonymous Audience

The reader/writer relationship is a messy one. It rarely involves standard communication and interaction, yet it almost always has the potential to be a liaison involving both love and hate (from both parties involved I’ve realized). What do I mean by that? Well, from a reader’s perspective there is always that agony when your writer takes that dreaded turn into the raging storm and you just want them to stop torturing that poor main character and you wonder as things go from bad to worse if there is any chance of said main character making it to shore… But also there are those moments when you hang on every word that the writer says, with such a tender sense of longing for their voice to never cease, for the story to be one that is indeed never-ending, so that you can spend every day on that ominous distant planet or even in that quite common spare room.

From a writer’s perspective the relationship is equally full of that love/hate. For me personally I am able to sit down and eagerly imagine my reader. Maybe its someone like my roommate who reads nightly by the faint light of her bedside lamp or perhaps someone like my father who only picks up a work of fiction once a year, if that. Could my reader be a child experiencing the agony and thrills of a chapter book for the first time? Or an elderly and avid reader intending this book to become a new favorite? At times this great-unknown collection of reading people is cause for motivation while at others it’s intimidating in the full sense of the word.

Which finally brings me, believe it or not after such a long intro, to the point I was intending on writing about this evening: AUDIENCE.

In my Technical Writing class one of the first things we learned about was writing for your audience. I hadn’t made the connection until about a week ago, and it was reaffirmed today, that knowing whom you are writing to is extremely important in any instance. It will affect the tone you use, it will affect the language you use, and most importantly (I think) it will affect how well you are able to write.

I think of a night in high school when I sat down with two close acquaintances, if not friends, and told them the ins-and-outs of a story idea I had started. They sat quietly, almost reverently, giving me their undivided attention. They loved the idea and wanted me to finish writing right away so they could read it. They may have just been saying what any friend would say about another friend’s idea but I view them as the perfect example of what kind of writer I hope to be and what kind of audience I hope to draw in. Friends.

Obviously not just my friends. But readers who feel like they could be my friend, who feel like they could sit down and enjoy a cup of tea and discuss my literary character or event as if they were real.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing for myself I’ve realized. This is terrible because I already know the characters, past, present and future. So sometimes I leave out important information or sometimes I include information that would bore a reader to death. It is important to me. But I need to be asking myself “What’s important to them?” (them being the anonymous audience referenced in the title).

I think, in summary and to bring back some focus, the best solution for making these mysterious readers more concrete and less daunting would be to write as if you are writing to a friend. No offence, cause I know you could be reading, but writing to a professor or writing to a classmate just wont cut it. The idea of writing to a friend is not a new concept for me but its one that I beginning to realize is more important than I thought. In our textbook for class Muriel Spark’s book A Far Cry From Kensington was quoted:

“You are writing a letter to a friend. . . . And this is a dear and close friend, real - or better - invented in your mind like a fixation. Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published, so that your true friend will read it over and over, and then want more enchanting letters from you.”

This is how I must write!

-J