4 Challenges of Writing for a Modern Audience
Sometimes I think everything I learned about life I learned from The Andy Griffith Show.
For instance, in the episode “Andy Discovers America,” when Andy is incredulous about the new school teacher “starting them awful young for history,” Aunt Bea just sighs, “Well, maybe they have to. There’s more of it these days.”
If that idea was true of history back in 1963, it’s even more true of literature in 2019.
One of the coolest things about this ultra-modern era is the insane number of stories literally at our fingertips. It’s staggering. Not only are we able to access the vast archives left to us by hundreds of ancestral generations, we are also living at an unprecedented moment of story output. Stories of all sorts—books, movies, TV, commercials, you name it—are created at a brain-numbing rate. Even those of us nerdy enough of to try could never sample them all.
This is incredible in so many ways. That I can decide I want to read Of Mice and Men, borrow it from Overdrive, and download it on my Kindle in all of three minutes (or less—I didn’t count) would no doubt astound John Steinbeck. Heck, these days we sometimes don’t even have to wait a week for a new episode of our favorite show. The latest season of Stranger Things? Pow. Watch the whole thing in one night.
And then what? What happens after I finish reading Of Mice and Men? After I finish bingeing Stranger Things? Well, I start looking for something else, of course. And something else and something else.
After a while, the stories we consume in our lifetimes rack up considerably. In 2002, I started tracking the number of books I read. At this point, I’ve recorded 1,777. Add to that the books I consumed before keeping a record. Then add what has to be at least twice as many movies. Plus TV (including many, many Andy Griffith reruns…).
Nearly everyone with access to either the Internet and/or a TV can probably say the same.
That’s a mountain of stories. An ocean of stories. A galaxy of stories.
But here’s the interesting thing. The more stories We the Audience consume, the more jaded we are likely to become in our consumption.
What’s this mean for We the Writers?
Basically this: today’s audience ain’t Granddad’s audience.
4 Challenges of Writing for a Modern Audience
Writers who are pointed to the exemplary writing of the classics often complain that the likes of Thomas Hardy and Edna Ferber couldn’t possibly get published these days. There’s some truth to that, in no small part because modern audiences are a far different crowd from those of a couple hundred years ago. (This is not to discount the continuing worth of the great classics. The evolution of the modern audience is firmly founded on all the literature that has come before.)
However, as modern authors writing for a modern audience, we must be aware of the unique challenges that face us, not only in connecting with the current audience, but also in recognizing the formative effects upon ourselves as members of that same contemporary audience.
You can start by taking note of these four crucial facts.
1. Modern Audiences Are Inundated With Stories
Generally speaking, the modern audience is pretty story savvy. They’ve seen it all, or at least feel like they have. And they believe (often rightly) that they are qualified to judge what they’ve seen or read, not just on a personal level, but on a technical level.
What This Means: It’s much harder for writers to pull off the old magic tricks. The audience not only knows someone’s working the levers behind the curtain, they also know exactly where the curtain is and how to pull it back.
At this point, audiences know every twist in the book. They have evolved super-smell when it comes to sniffing out foreshadowing. The gimmicks that might have wowed audiences of yesteryear are now seen as boring or even manipulative.
It’s true the story-consuming public may not understand all the conscious techniques of good story theory or storytelling, but they often do have an even better instinctive grasp of what’s working and what’s not than do those actually doing the writing.
What to Do About It: The only thing you can do to get a modern audience member to pay attention to your story, much less approve of it, is to write your guts out.
It’s not enough to write a good-enough story. Every single one of you reading this blog right now has read and watched hundreds of good-enough stories. Some of them you can name (probably just because they made you mad). Most of them you’ve relegated to the waste bin in the back your brain to save on cognitive space.
Write something brilliant. Write something original. Write something true. And most of all: write something packed full of so much quality that it stands out like a Thoroughbred in a lineup of burros.
2. Audiences Are Inundated With Subpar Storytelling
As awesome-sauce as it may be to live in an era with unlimited stories, it has its downsides. The biggest is simply that quality stories are ever-increasingly difficult to find amidst all the quantity.
The self-publishing boom of the early 2000s treated me well as an author, so I hate to knock it. But as a reader, it has turned out to be kind of a bummer. It’s frustrating and often defeating to have to scroll through page after page of the kind of ramshackle cover art that too often signals equally ramshackle storytelling.
But it’s not just that the Gatekeeper is dead and the Gates are down. Traditional publishing, Hollywood, indie filmmaking, and TV aren’t much better. There are shining gems out there to be sure. But the rubbish is piled so high and so wide, it’s hard for audiences not to grow increasingly jaded—and to some extent, numb.
What This Means: Modern audiences don’t have a lot of trust in their storytellers. After a certain point, they tend to assume (consciously or unconsciously) that any new story they try will probably disappoint them.
For example, going to the theater used to be a highlight event for me. I loved it. But somewhere in the last 5-10 years, I stopped going. I realized one day (after the extraneous debacle that was Jason Bourne) that I was increasingly disappointed with what I was experiencing whenever I sat down in a darkened theater. It wasn’t a highlight any longer.
In Secrets of Story, Matt Bird points out:
…every time an audience reads a bad book, watches a bad movie, or attends a bad play, it just gets harder for the next writer, because the audience is increasingly reluctant to care again.
What to Do About It: There’s both bad news and good news here.
The bad news, of course, is that if your audience is anywhere over the age of 15, you’re probably facing an uphill battle. They came, they saw—and they judged most of what they saw to be unworthy of their time and money. At this point, your story is going to be a hard sell to just about anybody (even your mom, if she’s honest).
The good news, however, is there’s a lot of room at the top. If you can climb the rubbish heap and hold aloft your polished gem of a story, the audience will enshrine you. (For better or worse, good marketing is also instrumental and, usually, indispensable.)
The first thing to do in the face of an increasingly tough audience is to refuse to give up. The second is to commit yourself to the long haul of writing a truly excellent story. Do it for yourself and for your audience, but do it also for your fellow writers. As Bird pointed out, bad writing is hurtful to all writers. One writer’s good story, however, makes it that much more likely another writer’s good story may also get its chance with that same audience.
3. Audiences Are Accustomed to (and to Some Degree Accepting of) Subpar Storytelling
Audience members may curtail some of their story habits due to disproportionate experiences with subpar stories, but they’re unlikely to quit cold turkey. Even if it weren’t all but impossible to opt out of stories in our media-driven culture, few people actually want to. We love stories so much we’d rather settle for poor stories than give them up altogether.
The problem here is that audiences—including the writers who are members of those audiences—become complacent in their acceptance of subpar work. How many times have we chosen a book or gone to a movie, knowing it was probably less-than-great—but it’s all that was available at the moment? When we are inundated with enough of these problematic offerings, we start expecting them, and then we start accepting them.
What This Means: For my money, the most insidious problem with this scenario is that these pervasive subpar stories are the ones writers are now learning from. For starters, many of these stories are extremely famous and profitable. So it would seem evident these are the stories we should all be imitating.
Furthermore, by their very ubiquity, these stories are becoming part of our era’s archetypal narrative. We are permeated with these stories. They inhabit our subconscious—which is the incubator for our own ideas and instinctive understanding of story. Even if we’re not taking all these stories seriously, we’re still gobbling them up by the hundreds. And you know what they say: we are what we eat.
I will often observe or participate in discussions in which a new writer will argue against good advice with the insistence that “[such and such a popular story] did it this way!” If pressed, a few more supporting examples might even be produced. At the risk of sounding too Mom-like, let me put it this way: just because a famous (and perhaps otherwise brilliant) author did something stupid doesn’t mean you should too.
What to Do About It: This is exactly why it is so important for authors to be not just members of the audience, but conscious members. Become a keen observer of your own reactions to the stories you read and watch. What do you like? What do you not like? What are you perhaps unconsciously accepting just because? And, most importantly, why? Why does something work? Why does something not work? And… how could it work better?
Writing well is no accident. It is what happens when an author is purposefully conscious of the effects of any given story and its techniques.
Let me also say this: you’ll have a better chance of keeping your writing healthy if you’re eating more veggies than candy. The occasional “junk” movie or “stupid” book, just because that’s the mood you’re in, is fine. But if that’s the bulk of your story intake, you’re in trouble. If you want to be great, learn from the greats, not the oh-well-this-isn’t-amazing-but-it’s-all-we-have-so-we’ll-just-make-do.
4. Audiences Think They Like New and Shiny
Storytelling is so glam these days. So many gorgeous book covers. So many stylish new visuals in the movies. So many hot modern actors with their hot modern haircuts. I’ll admit to stocking my Kindle with beautiful YA books that turned out to be a year’s worth of really bad reading. I’ll also admit (in a much more mumbly voice) to watching Nicholas Sparks movies just because the lead actors are beautiful.
When browsing shelves at the library, it’s so much more tempting to pick up something with a shiny new cover versus this:
Or some vapid new action movie versus this:
What This Means: Here are two anecdotes from my own experiences as an easily-distracted member of the modern audience.
As a reader, I took a break from my long-term pursuit of reading the classics. I was going through some difficult life stuff, and I just wanted to read “easy” and “fun” fiction for a while. So I chased after the pretty covers and found that, sure enough, easy though they might be, they started giving me a cotton-candy feeling in my stomach after a while.
So I decided to go back to the proven masterpieces for a bit. I chose Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, dove in, and from the very first paragraph experienced an almost palpable sense of the satisfaction that only good writing can create. No, Wharton’s not “easy.” She’s not even particularly “fun.” But in comparison to all that fluff I’d been distracting myself with, she was incredibly rewarding.
Same thing happened to me as a watcher. The simplest metric for knowing whether or not I’m engaged in a movie is whether or not I reach for my phone. If I’m bored, the phone comes out. I’m looking up the actors’ bios or the story’s factual context or the trivia on IMDb. But if I never pick up the phone, it means I’m hooked.
After a recent library visit when I brought home about an equal number of modern versus “old” movies, I was fascinated to find myself on the phone in the middle of almost all the modern movies. But Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson? I was rapt. The phone never got so much as a fingerprint on it.
If there’s a moral here, it’s this. Audiences don’t always choose the stories they should, even when they know better. Mostly, however, this is because the new stuff and the good stuff isn’t overlapping as prodigiously as it could.
What to Do About It: Again, good news, bad news.
The bad news is audiences are easily swayed by pretty things. In an age of short attention spans, new and shiny often seems much more interesting than old and proven. Marketing is king, because marketing is how readers and viewers find the content. If the marketing seems good, then the audience believes (often even when they know better) that the content should follow suit.
On the other hand, the good news is that because you live in this pretty modern age, there’s no reason your pretty book cover or stylish script can’t be the next shiny thing to snag the audience’s attention.
The catch, of course, is that you want your story to do more than catch your audience’s eye. You want it to keep their attention. And that requires, first, an awareness of the type and quality of stories—new and old—that capture and keep your attention. Write those stories, and write them well.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! What do you think is the greatest challenge of writing for a modern audience? Tell me in the comments!
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