Imagining your audience

(Nimue)

Creating for yourself is a fine thing to do. If you’ve made something for yourself and you put it out into the world, how that may go is anyone’s guess. It works better to imagine your intended audience. That might sound mercenary – and it can be – but it doesn’t have to be. You can also think about this in terms of service.

It’s not possible to create something everyone will like. Trying to do so tends to result in blandness and unoriginality. If you focus on a subset of people, and make something for them, the chances are that a bigger group will be able to enjoy or make some use of your work even though they weren’t the target. Adults who read YA fiction. Druids who read witchcraft books, Pagans who read eco-texts and so forth.

I try to factor this in when I’m reviewing. I am not going to judge every book on whether it’s perfect for me – that doesn’t really work. I’ve reviewed a lot of beginner’s books along the way, for a start. I try to figure out who the book is for and to assess how well I think it delivers on that score. I recently had a review book offered to me where I genuinely couldn’t figure out who the intended audience was, and I had to ask. I’m not going to be reviewing it, for a bunch of reasons. It did however get me thinking about how we imagine the audience.

It’s not really enough to just imagine an audience – you need to know who your people are. If they only live in your head, they may well be facets of yourself. I admit that I wrote my first non-fic – Druidry and Meditation – for the person I had been, who had to figure a lot out because there weren’t enough books on Pagan meditation back then. By that point I’d also spent a lot of time leading meditation groups, so I had some sense of what other people needed from me.

Writing is not a solitary activity. The bit where you put the words down probably is, but that’s only a small part of the process. Knowing who you are writing for, and why, and what’s needed is a really important part of the job if you wish to write for other people.

It also helps to think about this for managing your own expectations. There are blog posts I’ve written because I thought there was a decent chance there might be one person who needed to hear what I had to say. I set the bar a bit higher with books. I find Patreon very helpful for this because I have a small audience there and they feed back to me, and I am writing for them. I learn from feedback on the blog about what people who like my work find especially resonant or helpful. Creating is a process and a conversation.

There is a perception that what we create is supposed to pour from us in a wild gush of inspiration. It doesn’t really work like that. Creativity is an interaction with the world – what goes in, what comes out, and where it goes. I don’t think it’s possible to create anything without that interaction, it’s just a case of whether we’re alert to it and what we choose to do.