Considering Audience--
The question and practice of considering, or failing to consider, audience, is everywhere.
I saw this, and thought…
…that’s a question of…
…audience!
The post is about sex, obviously, but more than that, I’d say it’s about how one “listener” crafts her own life through an awareness of engaging an audience, her friend. The third party is being used as content, material, jokes. If we imagine that third-party (parties) listening in, they become the new audience…and that changes…everything…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of audience, lately, and how it shapes the work we make, the way we live, the way writers write, consciously or unconsciously perhaps—and how we, writers, can become aware of our sense of audience and tighten down on delivery, becoming both more accountable and better writers.
Who is your ideal audience? Who might be your nightmare? Who are you writing for? Who are you speaking back to? Are you operating out of defiance? Generosity? Other?
Who—if anyone— sits in the imaginary auditorium, or on the next barstool over in the dive tavern or high-class joint of your mind and heart, criticizing or otherwise shaming the stories and jokes you tell, the world you craft, and how can you navigate those waters? Who is outsider, who is insider?
Also, how might you consider the broader humanity of others to work in integrity?
How can we gain an awareness of audience, to enrich our essays, shape our stories?
If you’re interested, I’ll have this conversation here:
Consider Audience, Shape Your Delivery | monicadrake
At this moment, you are my audience. If you write back, I will be an audience to your words, in our conversation. It’s a moving paradigm, like gears shifting.
Cheers,
Monica
Ultimately, I imagine a lot of authors write for themselves -- I don’t think there’s necessarily any particular audience in mind other than themself. I imagine that writers will write work that they themselves would want to read, because otherwise, what’s the point? Considering it’s his birthday and the sentiment fits with the topic of sex in the post, I think David Foster Wallace’s analogy of writing being like masturbation, that ultimately no one can do it as best as you can, is pretty apt. That and another time where on Charlie Rose’s show he said that if you think about an audience too much it’s a quick way to go nuts.
So, taking that line of thinking into consideration and to summarise: the author’s job is to pleasure themself, while thinking only of themself, and hoping that all the while people may possibly derive some form of pleasure from their solo act of pleasure should it become available to them.
A recent example that serves in credence to the notion of authors writing for themselves and not a hypothetical audience -- Bret Easton Ellis’ latest novel, ‘The Shards’, has this statement on the dedication page: “For no one”.
The concept of having an auidence is too foreign to me. I don't even know where to begin to build that. I write for myself or I would have stopped years ago.