Audience

My sister-in-law recently commented on the different reactions people had to the same movie. She watched October Baby with church friends, and again with school friends, and found a disparity in focus. Her church friends thought the movie was all about a young woman’s discovery of her adoption, then survival of an abortion, and the forgiveness and healing that followed. Her school friends were more interested in the burgeoning relationship between the protagonist and the guy who is not her boyfriend in the beginning but obviously will be by the end because his eyes are the most dreamy, or something like that. I happen to know that my sister-in-law’s father (who is incidentally also the father of my wife) thought of it as a story of a daughter facing difficult revelations at the same time that she is leaving home, and how a father learns to love her through the transition of their relationship. Movie critics tend to agree with the church crowd on what October Baby is about, although many stood on the other side of the argument; they took it to be a smarmy, disingenuous attempt to undermine the pro-choice position.

Perspective is one of those things that writers do a lot of thinking about. You can completely alter a story by shifting the narrative from third to first person, and exchanging a disembodied omniscient narrator for a personal, fallible one. Likewise, present tense can be more immediate and impactful but also irritating, so past tense should be considered as well. Then we get embroiled in the world of the characters, using whiteboards or reams of notebook paper to keep track of who knows what and how each would react to which bit of information, and it’s easy to forget the most important perspective of all; that of the audience.

It’s all about the audience. We can talk about artistic integrity all day long but in the end we have to eat, and it is the audience who pays us. All art consumers bring their own worldviews, personal prejudices and kinks to the table when they read and watch and listen, and each will willfully, gleefully misinterpret the art as they see fit.

My writing audience tends to be exceptionally small, usually a single English instructor, and in my experience English instructors have been relatively easy to please. Show a working knowledge of the material, bonus points if you reveal an interest as well. Make sure your citations are done correctly and you’re good to go. I’m looking forward to the time when I can worry about what my greater audience will think, but in order to do that I need to get an audience.

One gets an audience by being published.

One gets published by submitting content.

One needs content before he can submit it.

Well folks, my clever insight about audience just got turned into another reminder of my procrastination. I’ll write, I swear, just as soon as I finish my coursework and...