Audience of One
Today, we’re going to keep things simple. The title of an article is like a label for what’s inside, or at least it should be. Many folks today create titles like they are writing a synopsis of a thing, so desperate for clicks are they. That’s tangentially what we’re going to succinctly talk about today.
Write for an audience of one: yourself.
You may think that such a thought is pretentious or the like, but it’s really not. If you don’t like what you’re writing. If you’re bored of the string of words you’ve created, what makes you think anyone else is going to care?
You don’t want to stink of desperation. You want people to approach your work of their own accord. We shouldn’t need a separate complete work to analyze your work (unless and until we do). Literary analysis is all well and good, but when you attempt to write a work for the ages, you’re doing your audience of one a disservice, unless you truly wish to write literary works.
The pulp world writes works that entertain. The literary world write works that indulge in more cerebral experiences. They can cross-pollinate, though they rarely do.
When you write, you are not limited by a budget for special effects and actors and set pieces and locations, you are limited only by your skills and your experiences. People say write what you know. While that’s all well and good, write about what you don’t know too, write about what you want to know. You’re going to find out over the course of your work the things you didn’t know before you started, the things you need to know. You should, however, know and understand conflict and strife, and have a bit of life under your belt. You want your work to have honesty, gravitas, and, most importantly achieve the one goal you set out for it.
If the goal is to simply be finished and put away, that’s a fine enough goal too. You’re always writing for an audience of one, no matter how large your audience may eventually be.
When you’re creating a game world, a storytelling setting, something for interactivity, you will have to learn about things you would not normally care to know about. You may learn about gun laws from bygone centuries. You may learn about hairstyles and fashions and medicines and things that may never fully make it into your work, but, nevertheless inform your work. Put in only what you need to put in. Unless your work requires concentrated passages about corsets, you’ll likely find a paragraph may well suffice for your purposes.
Think wisely. Write well.
Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu.
