‘…writing something other people will read forces you to think well. So it does matter to have an audience.’
That’s a quote from Paul Grahams article ‘The Age of the Essays’. This line, which was mentioned briefly, suggests that a writer to should keep an audience in mind when working on his essays, but I am also going to take it in the context for writers of all kinds such as, novelists, poets, screenwriters etc. Graham thinks that writers should write for people, however this is something I disagree with, when it applies for professional writers. The article compares what Graham calls, “real” essays to essays that are taught in schools, now these are two different kinds, as stated in the article, but one of the things that I believe separates the two is the fact that one of them will be read and one of them will mostly likely not.
Essays that are written in schools will be read, because the students are told to write them, so that they can get marks, and the teachers will read them. To get good marks students have to make sure that the essays fits the criteria that is being expected to being present in the essays. Therefore students must keep their audience in mind, which in this case is the teacher, in order to get good results. However with any other kind of professional writing I feel like it’s a danger to keep an audience in mind for two reasons, which are, one I believe when you are a new writer no ones going to want to read your work, and secondly because as a writer you don’t know exactly what your audience would want.
Just to elaborate on that most writers in the beginning get rejected over and over again before they get their big break. Lawrence Kasdan for example, if your are not familiar with is the writer of The Empire Strikes Back, wrote scripts for around ten years before he sold his first script. Over 90 publishers rejected J.K Rowling when she brought them Harry Potter. Now I know what you might be thinking, both writers went on to be successful and they had their stuff read or seen by millions, but when reading the works of people like them, you know that they weren’t thinking about an audience or who is going to read it, because when these stories hit the shelf and screen what went through many peoples minds were how original or refreshing it was to read something like this.
Reading Harry Potter was an experience one which opened the minds and imagination to a lot of its readers, and to a lot of people they have never read anything like it before. So what I am trying to get at here is that if people felt like what they had read or seen was something they never thought of, how could these writers have written it for the audience, and what they might like?
Stories like the ones I mentioned above are pieces of work that are written from a particular point of view and when it is read the authors voice can be heard, and it feels personal, and the author is present. Now when you keep a group of people in your mind and try to write something for them that’s sense of personality a stories has is lost because a writer wouldn’t know how a million individual people think. If they could then there would be a story that is loved by every single person on earth, and that’s not how the world is, even the most brilliant of tales in history will be seen as trash in someone else’s eyes, and there nothing anyone can do to please everyone. And keeping an audience in mind is essential trying to please a group of people, and that’s what writing shouldn’t be about.
Writing is something that should be done because and you love it and the stories you write should be the ones you would to read or see, and not something that is just for other people. They should be written for you.