Do you really think about the reader?

I feel like there's some sort of "Captain Jack" moment here...

"At least you bought the book," or something...

 

To me, writing is communication. I can see that other art forms can be just for the artist, but that would never work for me and writing.

 

Does 'for my own consumption' imply content rather than form? Presumably awkward form wouldn't please you either, even if you were just writing for yourself?

I reckon 'fit for human consumption' is more about whether the audience 'gets' you, and gets what you mean to say.

You might write a story with absolutely no controversial content, but if you write it in such a way that people are scratching their heads and wondering what's going on, or completely confused as to which character is speaking, then you're not communicating your story. That's when thinking about the reader really needs to take place.

Marketing your story to the right market for your content and form? That's another issue, really. You might, for example, have written an excellent story that doesn't quite fit the reader base you thought it would. It might contain a slant or content that isn't appropriate for YA fiction. Or maybe scenes that are too gross and bloody for a 'cosy mystery.' Or a Romance that ends unhappily for the lovers. Of course, you could rewrite it ...but that might be a shame if your story was actually good. It might be better to look at a different market for it.

 

Yes. There is a difference between being prudish and being repetitive with sex scenes that don't move the story forward (but actually can stall it.) A sex scene is just like any other scene, really. If what happens before the sex takes place is what's important, then you don't need to include the sex. If what happens during the sex is important to the story, then you show it happening in whatever detail is called for. Seems simple, really.

Mind you, if you are writing out-and-out erotica, then maybe readers would be annoyed if you skimp on the sex. I guess it all depends on reader expectation in whatever genre you write.

 

As I write? Not too much, I don't think. I'm usually focused on putting words on the page in a way that looks good to me. But as I read and revise my work? Absolutely. It's important to make sure things are clear, that necessary details/emotions are coming across and remove unnecessary ones, so on. Hard to do that without imagining a "reader" who doesn't have all the context for what's going on that I do.

 

Nah, I think all art is communication. Like, almost by definition. Writing a song, making a sculpture, knitting a quilt; all of this is making something for public consumption. Yes, at some times things are more or less expressive and more or less for the artist but... Why write a song if you're never going to play it? The sculptor knows what he's trying to create and can see it in his head, so why bother with the marble if you aren't intending to make your idea into something others can look at?

Just turning an artistic impulse into an artifact is de facto an effort at communication. It's taking something out of your head (where no-one can see it) and placing it in the real world (where everyone can see it if they want to) and I can't see how that's not communication.

 

Yes, I meant in terms of content rather than form. I meant that it's purely wish fulfillment on my part; just things that I write to keep myself busy that don't require any real creative effort but that plays up to the things that I know that I like.

And yes, I do agree about fit and form of a story does matter a lot. Honestly, when you are trying to sell a book is the first time that you're going to be up against it in terms of finding out if your story fits an audience. As long as it's just a document, even one shared and betaread, it's still not quite meeting an audience in the same way. And you can certainly find out that your writing isn't the fit that you imagine.

There is a fine line between unique and interesting; and being not really suitable for this audience. It's very easy to think that what you're writing is just a little outside the norm enough to make it something people really want to read, but in reality it's way outside what those kind of readers pick up. In fact, it's easy to think that those 'inside the lines' books must be bad and the readers really want a change and that's just... No, most of those readers like that, there's a reason why those books sell. And if you make a book that's too different then you've written something that's difficult to place within an audience.

If you like writing 'orrible murders then that's not a bad thing; the world of horror and thrillers is just waiting for you. There is an audience who likes that, and even if you did rather enjoy writing the more lighthearted detective work; well, you can have one or the other but not both because there isn't really an audience for both at the same time. As long as you can figure out what stuff you actually care about having in your books then you can find the audience that wants to read that. Yes, you need to make some other changes, yes you need to actually put in elements this new audience likes, but you really can find people who already want to read your style of work and isn't that more important than continually banging on the door of the wrong people?

That is almost exactly what I did. I like writing teens, I like writing romance and I like making my characters cry but... I can negotiate on just how I'm going to do that. Teen romance is a thing, and you can be edgy in that world, but you can definitely go too far. And that's ok. Because I'm still writing the kind of stories that I like, I'm just tweaking the formula to find something that makes it more amenable to the audience that wants to read about teenagers falling in love. That I've moved away from doing the bleakest, blackest, most horrible things I can imagine to my characters isn't really a big deal to me; I can still put them through some nasty shit just it has to be bad to them not to me. But it has the same effect and the same meaning in the plot. So what did I actually change at all?

 

Perhaps it might be instructive to think about the writers who didn't for a single second consider who was supposed to be reading their work?

Ayn Rand really is the one name that comes to mind as being someone who simply refused to do this. Not someone who was oblivious; she was fundamentally opposed to the idea of doing so. In fact, that is literally what The Fountainhead is about; never compromise, never surrender, if you can't make it your way burn it to the fucking ground. And, well, Ayn Rand did eventually succeed. And both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are some good books, or at least they are thought provoking and literarily interesting, partially because of the philosophy of their author. In a general sense it's probably a good thing they were published.

But...

Man they are a tough read. Those are some long books man. Atlas Shrugged is over a thousand damn pages long. I'll say that again; Atlas Shrugged is longer than all three LoTR books bound together. It's longer than War And Peace. Now, back in the 50s it wasn't quite the '100k or nothing' world just yet, but I think on balance we can sympathize with all those agents who turned her down when they were presented with a 560k word tome. You can absolutely see why a lot of publishers said "People aren't going to buy this". While some of us might rankle at the idea that popular books have to meet a word limit we can all appreciate the fact that people getting on a plane to go on holiday definitely aren't going to pick up the kind of book that'll take them over the luggage limit. And that doesn't mean that every book needs to be holiday reading, but it does mean that people would like to finish your book while they're still young. She really could have made a lot of cuts and it would have made no difference to the message. Hell, she could have pulled out the separate strands and produced a series of books from them to make it a more accessible book. And she didn't. And seriously, it suffers for it. It's great in spite of that. And it could have been much better just with some attention paid to what other people want to read. Even Gulag Archipelago is split into volumes, you know? And that's a very serious book with no fictive elements that could get away with being essentially infinitely long if it wanted to.

So length is one problem for Rand's books. But it's not just that. Her main characters are really close to being totally unlikable. And the reason for that is because they just don't have any doubts. Rourke in The Fountainhead is the worst offender here. The Fountainhead is basically the story of his life from being a young man forward; a life of unswerving certainty in his own greatness. And for those who haven't read it who just went "Wait, what?" if anything I am underselling it. He never doubts himself, he never stops to ponder if actually he is the problem. He just knows right from the start that he is better than everyone else and eventually he'll show them all. This is the hero. Who, by the way, is also a rapist who dynamites his greatest work because someone changed a tiny detail in it. His struggle is totally against the world outside him. He has no internal struggle at all. He never doubts his own genius. He never does the human thing, which is to sit back and wonder what it is about his work that makes everyone else recoil. The book tries to make this out as mediocre men turning up their noses at greatness but no matter how much Rand makes those other guys into twats Rourke is still a massive bellend. He is very hard to sympathize with.

Again, you can understand why people didn't immediately click with this work, right? Because in lots of places Rand is almost talking past the audience, she's on her soap box and she clearly adores Rourke and sees him as so heroic. But the audience really struggles with that. Rand can see herself in Rourke but the audience really can't. To Rand Rourke's refusal to change and his dedication to his craft is perfect and wonderful; what she believes an artist must be. But to the readers? I mean, how can any of us see ourselves in that kind of character? We are all artists and creatives, and we all know the feeling of doubt and uncertainty in our own skill. We have all had cause to wonder if we are really that good, even those of us who are already successful. It's super hard to sympathize with someone who refuses to acknowledge they might be the problem because we have all met that kind of person and seen that it's always them who is the problem. People who can't or won't change aren't people we like. People without any self awareness and without the reflection to try and work with what's around them are just... It's hard to like them, and it's hard to sympathize with them when they run up against problems in their lives. And Rand could have fixed this just by giving Rourke some internal conflict, some self awareness. You can absolutely write a 'no compromises' character, you can even make them your hero but you have to speak to real people's experiences. You need to show the doubt, show the uncertainty, show the fear they might be wrong. Oh an ideally don't make your MC a rapist, that makes them more sympathetic too.

And while I can't help but have a certain admiration for Rand for having the courage of her convictions, at the same time she is really lucky that she happened to be someone who actually was a good writer. Can you even imagine how depressing a story hers would be if Rand herself turns out not to be a Rourke-like figure; can you imagine her plugging away until her death still trying to make the world appreciate her work and it turns out she sucks and has just been suffering from a life long case of Dunning-Kruger? Her determination to write what she wanted and nothing else is in a sense laudable but only because she eventually succeeded. If she had never been published, certainly had The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged not become best sellers, then her story would be one of a life wasted, of a talent tragically misapplied.

Ayn Rand should not be seen as an example of how you can ignore the audience and still succeed. She should be seen as a cautionary tale for how ignoring the audience hurts you as a writer. Because she really could have been one of the greatest writers of the 20th century instead of weird annex of literature that is only really talked about by fans of her philosophy. If Rourke had been a hero that everyone could understand and sympathize with who struggles and fights and overcomes, not against mediocre men outside him, but against himself and his sense of doubt to finally realize his dream; that is a story that people would want to read. Instead we got... What we got. And it's something that you just don't see people talk about. In fact, Rand only tends to crop up in discussions like this these days.

In so many words; normal people realize that they need to change their thinking when things don't work out for them. That's the lesson of Ayn Rand. And that's all that thinking about the reader and the audience really is. It's a process of tweaking your thinking and your ideas so they move from being something just for you to something that is for everyone. You can still handle whatever material you want, you can even communicate an *clears throat* interesting branch of philosophy in a book that other people want to read.

And, as it turns out, if you meet people half way and tell them the kind of story they already think they want to read then you can actually communicate your message a lot better because you reach more people and the ideas stick in their head. A critical part of every message is on the receiving end. Broadcasting to no-one isn't communicating. The purpose of a message is to reach people. If you want to reach people you have to broadcast on a wavelength they are listening to. It will never matter how great your writing is if you need a neutrino detector to actually get the message.

 

She's an interesting example because, to me, one of the problems I have with her work is that she seems so aware of her audience, in that she's lecturing to us the whole time! Her fiction isn't fiction so much as a thin layer of story spread over her philosophy/dogma.

I can see what you're saying, in that she's an author who didn't take publication into account, or didn't adapt her work to make it more palatable, but I don't think she fits into the "writing for herself" camp. I think she was definitely writing for others because she wanted to spread her ideas; she just wasn't writing to entertain others.

 

That's an interesting take.

I agree that she's definitely lecturing a lot of the time, and I can see what you mean that to do that she must be aware of her audience to some degree. But at the same time; she was hellbent on getting her ideas to them. In a sense, the audience she's thinking about is a captive one; like a university lecturer who's going to drone on and on about whatever subject and the students have no choice but the take it as they find it.

She thinks she's Rourke, she thinks that if she just pushes hard enough people will be forced to acknowledge her ideas. She certainly never made any attempts to change her ideas to mesh with what other people would think. You either swallow her message whole or you throw it up; there is no middle ground, no softly softly. She's not really trying to convince anyone, she's writing to people who already think Rourke is a hero. And that is... Well, who is that? Her. And a few others maybe, but certainly not an audience.

Yes, she was writing to spread her ideas but she didn't think for a second about the people who she was trying to spread them to. And I think that's an important difference. Very many writers are writing put their message out there; I'd argue that every writer is doing that to some degree. But you can still do that without thinking about the people on the receiving end, you can still end up trapped into focusing on the message and ignoring the messenger. The messenger does matter.

 

@LostThePlot I read Atlas Shrugged when I was in college, at a time when her "philosophy" was somewhat attractive to me, and I thought THEN that it was one of the worst novels I had ever read.

 

Well Rand's literary talents are of course a matter of personal taste. For what it's worth; I think she's a good writer, I think that her books are at least thought provoking. And I think she has some real flaws too; including an aversion to editing and the way that she builds paragon characters. But I do like her prose. I especially think Rourke's trial from The Fountainhead is excellently written. It just happens to be three quarters of the way through a book that I think it would be fair to describe as 'interminable' up to that point.

But regardless of her talents; the point is more about her relationship with her audience and with the people trying to sell her book. I mean; she's someone who refused to change for like... Ten years I think? Just kept selling the same exact manuscript over and over. That is the action of a crazy person, even if she was a genuine genius, it's just so obviously not the way to get your message anywhere. And I suspect that all writers who don't include thoughts of their audience and publishability will eventually fall into that same trap; essentially damning the world for not giving you what you deserve instead of giving people something they want.

 

No, not really. I think about my Characters and their stories (And that every so intrusive lore ) . Which is why I have trouble revising it for the Reader.

 

I don't agree that she was a genius at all. Her writing was polemic, thinly veiled as fiction, and, much like Allan Drury's work after Advise and Consent, grew tiresome to read because she only had the one point to make over and over and over. Conservative writer William F. Buckley shredded her "philosophy" in the opening essay in his collection, The Jeweler's Eye.

However, I agree with you that she cared nothing about her readers. Only for the point she wanted to make. And make. And make.

 

Right, that was my point. It doesn't really matter what you think of her writing; what matters is that she didn't try to make her writing more accessible. There's lots of bad writers out there who are published and who make a decent living doing it. It's nothing shocking to say that bad writers make good money.

What matters is that Rand, even presuming that she's awful (and I can understand why anyone would think that) could have still improved her work by looking to the reader and the publishers and thinking about what they wanted to see as well as her philosophy. You might say that she would still have been a polemicist and that's probably still true, but at the same time she might not have taken ten years to find a publisher.

Her books might still have been bad. But they would have been more palatable and likely would have found a wider audience. And really that's all we can think about when we think about our audiences. Thinking about your audience won't ever directly make you a better writer. Your prose will still be your prose, your style will still be your style. All that tailoring your books to your audience can do is help ease people into that. And that's a good thing, certainly. It helps to make your work more accessible and eases people in to what you are doing instead of hitting them in the face with it. But it's still going to be your writing.

I think you are a better writer for thinking about your audience, but not because it makes you write better. It makes your book better, it increases your chances of success but it doesn't effect the way you write. It changes what you write, not how you write.

 

I will say I'm not failing. Struggling at times but not failing. I read a lot, but when I'm reading I don't think about the writer. And when I'm writing I don't think about the reader. But I don't think that prevents me from producing works that people want to read. When I'm working on a story I'm in that world fully. It's like I kind of leave this one for awhile. And I don't think it's crazy if it takes 100-plus times to publish.

 

I think that's the right way to write. Consideration of the audience needs to come before and after. As you build an idea you need to be thinking if the audience will like this kind of character, if this setting will be interesting to them. But then you write it and you write it to the best of your ability; you don't think about anyone else you just make it the best that you can and no-one can challenge you for doing that. But then you edit, and you make sure that what you wrote still adheres to what the audience wants, what they want to read, and most notably that your audience will feel the same about your writing as you do. That last isn't easy. Because your readers don't see things how you do, especially when you're looking at scenes that you really love.

As for submitting hundreds of times; it's a balancing act. You need to be down the middle. You can't be over confident in your work. You can't just keep on keeping on hellbent on pushing this one idea onto shelves. You need to know when to drop it, you need to know when to do something else and you need to know what you did wrong last time. But you can't be too timid either. You need to make a real effort to get your work out there, you need to submit lots of times and keep on submitting. You need to have the courage of your convictions and sell your book to the best of your ability; you need to be full throated and courageous. And then whether you get published or not you still need to go write another book and make it better than the last one.

In the abstract it's not crazy to submit a book a hundred times. There's lots of agents, and you do need to spread your net fairly wide. You need to be open to pitching your work in different ways and trying agencies that initially you didn't feel you clicked with. But you do have to be open to the idea that this book is not quite the one that makes your career. And that's when you sit down and say, in my case, "The voice is good, the writing is good, the war-crime of a downer ending is not so good. The angst is good, the romance is good and so is the isolation, but the really graphic self harm probably not so much since parents are supposed to buy this for their kids".

So you consider what you did, you consider the audience and how they mesh and then you go and do it all over again.

 

When I started writing I was of the "sit down at the keyboard and open up a vein" school. It was really satisfying, but totally exhausting, and when I look back at what I wrote then, I kind of cringe. (Mostly because I hate editing and my publishers didn't MAKE me edit, so the books went to the public more or less raw).

My later books were more disciplined, written with more of an eye to the craft and to the established standards of fiction.

I'm more pleased with my later books (or at least, I cringe less) but my first book is still my best seller. For some audiences, at least, raw emotion may be what sells. And apparently my publisher knew that... they're one of the few publishers in the field still standing, so they clearly were doing something right...

 

How many bands are there out there who's fans swear blind it was their first album when they were really good even though they were radically worse songwriters and musicians back when they were 20 and broke and playing on whatever instruments they had? Because they were young and hungry and they were doing something fresh, and people forgive the blemishes because they see something in that.

Problem is that even if you had stayed in that same style that makes you cringe today you almost certainly would have seen the same problems. Because while rawness is something that people react to, they don't react to it forever. And your choice is either to grow and no longer be raw, or keep banging out the same old style until no-one thinks it's interesting any more.

I wouldn't say that my older writing makes me cringe. My writing jumped out almost fully formed. But I do look back and see my mistakes, see my missteps all over them. It was certainly the embryonic state of my work, it was before I knew what I liked to write or even what genre I was in. When I look at it I see missed opportunities. It took me six books, two complete trilogies, to start to figure out what I was doing and who might want to read that.

In the end I feel better to know that it won't be those works that I put out first. I still think they're good, I still think that one day I'll put them out even if I have to self-publish them once I have more stature. But they are all clearly stumbling steps towards being the writer that I really wanted to be. In a sense I really couldn't have written my present books back then. Not because I was too raw, simply because I would never once have considered writing them.

 

I heard this theory somewhere, I can't remember where.

The idea is basically: creativity is generated by reading other people's books and watching other people's movies. So when you write your first book, you're working with a lot of material. 15-30 years worth of material. You know what your favorite ideas are. Your favorite characters. Favorite romances. Favorite kind of scenes. You pour all of that into your first book, raw.

Then when you write your next books... you're working with less.

So your later books might have more skill, but your first book has more enthusiasm. It has the raw fun stuff people like.

It's just something I heard. It makes a lot of sense to me, and it inspired me to write more enthusiastic books. I went the opposite direction; I used to be more disciplined. Now I just pour my heart out on page.

One of my favorite authors said, once, that when she wrote her first book, she literally just sat down and made a list of all the things she enjoyed. Rooftop chases. Princes. Secret identities. Sword fights. Political intrigue. Enemies-to-lovers romance. And she just sat down and wrote an entire book around those things. Surprise, surprise, it's now my favorite series.

 

Hooooly shit, me too! I've always had this weird feeling that no other book I write will ever live up to my first book, and I think this is totally at the root of those feelings. UTK was nothing short of a labor of love, and I unabashedly threw my entire heart and soul into writing it. I love all my stories and characters but I feel like it's when you still carry a torch for your first love a little even though you're married to other people now.

Mind. Blown.

 

Yeah, I've heard something very similar.

The version I've heard is that bands start out with, as you say, a whole life's worth of passion and energy. They know what they like, they know what they think is missing from the world and they have something they really want to say. They are broke starving artists with a lot of angst and an axe to grind. They really want to stick it to someone. And they explode out there with an album like Ten by Pearl Jam; which is a great album, like an all time great album. And then they get rich and they don't have the same worries they used to. They get older and a bit fatter and can do whatever they want. And they've already said the things they really cared about. But they still have to go out there and make some new music; without the same drive and the same passion that lead them to becoming musicians.

They are, in effect, suffering from the artists curse; you have to go and do better than the one album that you put your whole life, and maybe even bet your livelihood on. And you can't just make the same again, and you can't make it too different and you have to find other stuff to care about and it's really hard to get that magic back. Oh you're a better musician now, you're a better song writer and sometimes you can get some of that back. You can find your grove and find new things you want to say. But you'll always be judged by the thing you made as a twenty year old with a grudge.

As a writer that's not quite so bad but it's the same basic problem. It takes a lot to get your first thing out there. And of course you badly want to get out there and make writing your job not your hobby. You have a hunger for it, and you go looking for things to write that you can really do something with. But once you're comfy and once you're well regarded how do you stay hungry? How do you keep tapping into the vein of creativity and (in my case) blackness?

I've said before that I do sort of fear that I'm just writing the same book over and over. I don't think other people can see that in my work, I think that's just in my head. But I do worry about it. I do worry if my first proper book was my best one. I do wonder if my more recent works, which are more commercial and more acceptable but that I didn't quite take the same relish in, are me running out of steam. I don't think so. I certainly hope not. But it is an concern. I had to be talked into seeing that the last book I wrote was actually emotionally effecting in the same way. And on reflection I think that it is still good and is still unique and I don't think I'm quite out of demons to throw at my girls just yet. But of course it's a worry.

 

For sure.

I found that, for me, I could change it. Now everytime I write a book I pretend it's my favorite book. I pour everything I've got into it, all my favorite tropes, everything.

I come back to the same tropes a lot. There's patterns. My main character is usually some kind of smooth-talking morally ambiguous trickster-- a con man, a thief, an assassin, something along those lines. There's usually a best friend who betrays the main characters and joins the bad guy, only to be "rescued" and "reformed" later. There's some kind of enemies-to-lovers story. Someone always gets kidnapped. There's lots of lying. Lots of humor. Big rescue scenes and big car chases. Tragic secret backstories. Secret midnight kiss scenes.

So I guess, I write for me. I do think about the reader... will the reader be bored? Will they understand this part? Is my point clear? What will they think of this character? But at the same time, I expect the reader to like the same things I do.

 

That's something that I try to do too.

When I sit down with a new book I know there's something unique that caught my attention but otherwise I try to just write them as I want them to be, instead of anything else. I will always come back to some similar areas; isolation and angst is important to my work. And of course I'm always going to be writing a girl who is between 14 and 16 and doing the things girls that age do. There's always going to be first kisses, there's always going to be big, nasty emotional moments that tug at the heart strings. And it's that kind of stuff that makes me see I'm treading on my own toes, because I conceive of this stuff in similar ways. But when I'm writing I remind myself that as far as the reader is concerned this is my first book and I just make the best of it that I can.

My process is that I write one, then edit the previous one, then write another, then edit the first one. That way I never get hyper invested in one book or one story, I try to come in to each project with the same eye and the same drive for it. I know what made this interesting and I'm going to write it in my own way. And I know that it's ok if there are broadly similar strokes because, well, I write in a specific genre and with a specific audience. I can't go too far away from what they expect, if anything I need to get closer to what they want not further away.

And, well, you never know which book will be the first one of yours that anyone reads. You never know if your older ones will be published or not. If you think something is a good element that you've played on before then it's ok to go back to it. The thing that keeps cropping up in my work, other than the soul rending pain? Fatherhood. Fathers and their daughters. The first book was a girl who's parents are divorced and who misses her dad. The second one was a girl who's dad is wealthy and spoils her but is never there. The next one is a girl who's foster dad hits her. The one after is a girl who's dad is in prison. The next one I'm going to write is a girl with an alcoholic mother who's dad holds the family together. It's something I riff off because it's something I care about. And I don't think that's something to worry about. Yes, they are similar tropes, similar sets of feelings, but they aren't just the same.

 

Ayn Rand liked to say a lot of things about herself- who she was, what she was, etc. People that like to tell about themselves rarely know themselves as others now them.
Her writing was heavily influenced by long established writers that mostly catered to a buying audience, even if they liked to say they didn't.