Absolution Tour Guest Post
Hey gang! Today we have a guest post from Louis Corsair, author of the paranormal mystery novel Absolution. He’s here on his Absolution Tour and wanted to pop in and say hello. What’s more, Absolution is only $0.99/£0.77 for the duration of the tour, so grab your eBook copy now! Enjoy!
Recently, I had the opportunity to read “The Sense of Audience,” an essay by Eleanor Cameron, about authors who write children’s fiction and their views on this subject. The essayist argued that authors who write children’s books are very much aware of their audience, even while they claim they write for themselves. This was such an interesting topic that I read further into the subject. What I walked away with was that writers prefer to “write for myself” or themselves before writing for an audience.
I had to admit that at the time, I leaned towards the “I write for myself” position. But that’s a horribly vague thing to say. See, no matter how many articles I read that emphasized “writing for yourself,” I never got a sense for what they meant. What does it mean to “write for yourself”? What does it mean to “write for an audience”? Why do writers, like me, prefer one and shun the other?
I had to figure out what it meant to write for yourself. Do you mean that you write so that your fiction benefits you first and then society? Financially or as an addition to the literary make-up of the country you live in? Or do you mean that you write to please your own artistic needs before the expectations of the reader? Or do you mean that your first task as a writer is self-expression before crowd pleasing?
It dawned on me that this is all vanity. Writing is a complex process made up of smaller processes. After careful analysis, I came to the conclusion that a writer always writes for an audience. To go further, there is no distinction between what you write for yourself and what you write for an audience.
When you decide that you’re going to attempt a career as an author of fiction, you automatically gravitate towards your tastes. A person who hates the Romance genre won’t attempt to write a Romance novel. If you can’t stomach Science Fiction, I doubt you’ll be the next Orson Scott Card. And if you love Science Fiction and want to write Science Fiction stories, I seriously doubt you’ll exclude the science and put romance in its place.
Do you see how the lines blur?
Are you including the scientific elements because it’s expected in a Science Fiction story or are you including them because you want to emulate the wonderful Science Fiction stories you read as a child/young adult/adult geek? Both are correct. If you want your story published by a Science Fiction publishing house, then you will have those scientific elements in the story or you won’t have a hope in Hell. This is non-negotiable. You may consider yourself an artist who is above entertaining with your fiction, but that doesn’t mean that your publisher will agree.
This applies to all genres, even literary fiction. You dare not submit your earth-shattering masterpiece about the power of friendship and love in times of peril to your literary publishing house if it doesn’t meet their submission requirements. Most literary publishing houses will ask for an agent to walk you in. To impress an agent you will have to do more than assert yourself as an artist. The fiction has to speak for you. The writer must know how to tell a story.
This doesn’t apply to you because you self-publish? Think again. The moment you decide to publish, self-published or traditional, you assume (and hope for) an audience. That’s when you stop writing for yourself, when you make that decision. That’s when you start to cross the t’s and dot the i’s.
I know. It doesn’t sound as sexy as, “I write for myself.” But this is what storytelling is all about. You can’t have storytelling without a “story” and a “telling.” It defeats the purpose. It is inescapable. The writer always has to deal with the audience. And the writer always has to deal with their respective genre restrictions. Or what you would call audience expectations.
A detective story has to have a detective. A mystery has to have a mystery. An urban fantasy has to have an urban setting and fantasy elements. A romance has to have a man and a woman falling in love (or man on man and woman on woman if it’s meant for LGBT). Etc. Etc.
Right about now, the artist in you is saying, “This is all horribly restrictive.”
George Orwell, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, and Cormac McCarthy would disagree with you. Is the novel, 1984, not dystopian fiction? Is the novel, The Road, not post-apocalyptic fiction? How about Fahrenheit 451? Or The Big Sleep? Don’t they all have elements of genre and aren’t they SO much more than that?
The writers I mentioned above were well aware of audience expectations in their fiction, but they did something unique. They used those expectations to tell a better story. It adds that special element that I look for in the novels I read. Some attempt to do more than what’s expected. Not all writers do this.
While writing Absolution, I was all too aware of the audience. This is because I am also a lover of mystery and urban fantasy novels. My novel involves a murder mystery and has a detective, so it fits into the Mystery genre. But it has fantastical elements, like magic and otherworldly beings, in an urban setting, so it also fits into the Urban Fantasy genre. It seems as though I couldn’t budge anything. But this is not the case. I steer the reader into the familiar and then take them into a dark alley where they encounter unfamiliar subject matter.
Knowing what the audience expects allows you to surprise them. It makes a paradigm shift so much more potent.
In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson hooks the reader with fantastic characters (especially Salander) but also with the traditional whodunit. The reader expects to discover the murderer in the end, but the author steals that away from them. I won’t spoil that surprise if you haven’t read the novel, but it’s worth seeing how Larsson uses the elements of the traditional mystery story in a modernized way.
And knowing audience expectations has the added effect of pushing the boundaries of the genre you write in. If you’re writing a detective story, why can’t it be a female detective? A blind detective? A paraplegic detective? A gay detective? A transgendered detective?
In literary fiction, the writer also pushes the boundaries of what’s expected. Why can’t you tell that life-altering story from the point of view of the modern technology we use in life, like the television set and the automobile? Or maybe you use a collective voice instead of a singular voice.
The possibilities are endless. No writer is a bottled thing. So why are there negative connotations associated with the idea of writing for an audience?
I’ve come across writers in workshops who are so mesmerized by what they do that they reject any notion that belittles their writing. This led me to single out two very different kinds of writers in the world: Storytellers; artists.
The artist aspires to push the boundaries of the aesthetic side of writing, not caring so much for genre audience expectations because they don’t write genre and when they do, they do not call it genre. They are highly experimental authors who are willing to part with the traditional form of the novel. They explore the mundane nature of life with such a lens that it makes unexciting things seem profound. They usually win Pulitzers.
The storyteller just wants to tell a story. Maybe their prose is not as refined as the prose of the artist, but they get more pleasure from seeing their fans enjoy a good yarn. While many storytellers produce escapist works, theirs is a greater charge. They carry the stories of our era and the eras that are no more like a time capsule. They reinvent those old tales that are timeless. They are the historians of human dramas, but collect few facts. They are timeless. I am one these writers. We will always be here to tell you a story.
