There’s a lot of confusing advice for new writers floating around out there, and lately we’ve noticed that the advice centered around how writers should consider their audience can seem downright contradictory. In fact, if you google “Should you write for your audience or for yourself?” right now, the top headlines will give you a directly contradictory answers.
There are honestly good points on both sides. If you try to put your audience over yourself, your unique perspective may be over-shadowed, and your book becomes cookie-cutter. “Market preferences” of readers change so quickly that if you start a book to fit a trend, it will be over before you book comes to the shelf. Conversely, if you put yourself over your audience, you won’t be considering what they need to know to receive your message. You want your message to get out there, so your book needs to be appealing to an audience. For it to be appealing to an audience, you need to consider their wants and expectations.
Of course, like most complicated writing questions, the real answer is a bit of both. So how do you balance these needs? How do you avoid the fallbacks of focusing too much on one or the other? And specifically, how do you write your memoir—your very personal story—with an audience in mind?
In this week’s video and blog, we’re working on striking that balance so that writing your book is fulfilling for you and attractive to your audience.
You are also part of an audience
If you’re trying to write a book, odds are you also read books, and probably more than one type of book. As an exercise to start thinking about audience, think about yourself as an audience. When you choose a book, what do you reach for? What do you expect? What’s going to make you avoid a book?
If you make a list of these, you’ll probably find that you have some very basic expectations, and some are more specific to your preferences. You expect a thriller to be thrilling, a popular nonfiction to teach you something cool, and a memoir to give you an honest glimpse of life. You may also have particular topics or approaches that either you just love or rub you the wrong way. You might love a sarcastic, raw point of view or maybe you prefer a more earnest, vulnerable voice.
Now, if you flip that to looking at those same likes and dislikes from a writer’s perspective, you can divide them into two basic categories: promises and preferences. Successful books all have some basic promises they make to the reader, and they keep them: I have a point to make, I’m going somewhere with this, it’s all going to come together in a satisfying way.
Your book will need to make good on those basic promises in order to land with its audience.
Preferences are a bit different. Do you like to read books on serious subjects but that have humorous tones? Do you like books with frequent commentary throughout the narrative? Then you’re proof that the audience exists! You don’t need to cater to people who might not have that preference, because they might not be part of your audience. There are people out there who do! When you have it clear in your mind what elements of story are a promise and what are preferences, it’s much easier to balance writing for you and writing for your audience. It is also very helpful in sorting through what feedback you really need to take, and what feedback you can set aside.
Fulfill the promises and follow your own preferences and your book will find readers and will be satisfying for you to write.
Writing is a Process, a Book is a Product
Books are hard and take a long time. If you can’t maintain a sense or purpose and joy in your project for an extended period of time, it won’t ever even reach an audience. But not all parts of your process will be visible in that final product of your published book.
To make sure you’re balancing what you need from the process and what your audience will expect from your final book, you want to make sure you make deliberate choices about the inward-facing and outward-facing phase of each stage of the process: prewriting, drafting, and revision.
When you start the prewriting process, whether that includes gathering your recollections, journaling, research, you should absolutely suit yourself first. Your story is yours to tell and you should follow what interests, excites, moves, and motivates you as you gather your notes. It doesn’t even have to make sense to anyone but you. This part of the process is all inward-facing, so you can be unapologetically uncensored about what you include in your hoard of raw material. No audience consideration or input needed; private playground only.
Once you have all your materials, you are going to start making choices about structure. This is where you start to think about the promise you’re making with your book to potential readers. [briefly revisit core topic/key message/bracketing development steps] Once you have your core topic, and key message, and major turning points, you can then start to fill in for your messy outline draft.
Then, finally, you’re switch to addressing a potential audience directly by making an outward-facing version of your outline. When you flip from the inward-facing to outward-facing phase, it can really show you where there may be holes in your story, backstory that is needed, or just points of confusion. Even before you hand it off to the reader, this process of switching deliberately between inward and outward stages is really helpful to check in with whether you’re meeting those promises. If you have a trusted reader, we encourage you to get feedback on that detailed outline.
The best way to ensure good feedback is to give clear guidelines as to what you’re looking for. At this stage, the guidelines should not be focused on whether they have the emotional reaction you are hoping to evoke or even if they like the story or not. The feedback you want is whether it is clear. The only things you need to address at this stage is what is causing confusion. We’re not catering to preferences here; we’re making sure we’re fulfilling our promises.
When you get that feedback it’s time to flip back into inward-facing mode. Take the feedback and revisit. Did they understand the cause and effect of the narrative? Did they get a clear sense of the message? Did something feel missing? Did they in fact pick up what you’re putting down?
Each stage of the process will go through this same back and forth switch between connecting to what you want to express and whether it is hitting the target. As you get feedback on your whole draft, you can open it up to more details. As you take that feedback back with you to your writing desk, remember that you are looking for how the feedback can work for you, not how you can work for the feedback. Not every preference can be met, not every suggestion will help you deliver on your promise.
Honesty, not Outcome
When veteran writers advise beginners to not think about audience when they write, what they really mean is don’t freeze while you’re trying to predict your audience’s reactions.
Books and narratives can bring about real social change. Knowing that can be intimidating when you’re just starting out to share your story, because in some ways that feels like a lot of responsibility. But if we write hoping for very specific reactions and outcomes in a broad audience, we suddenly find ourselves making choices and compromises to meet individual preferences to get that desired outcome. This is a fool’s errand and can stop a book dead.
This can be particularly true for memoir writers, because you might be thinking of specific people who are going to read your book and definitely have reactions to it. Possibly even because they are part of the story. Not everyone who is going to read your book is part of your target audience. Depending on your story, there may be people who will read your book, whether they know you or not, that are already hostile to what you’re trying to say to your audience. Don’t let potentially hostile readers stand in between you and your audience. Your book is not for them.
Narrative writing, at its heart, has an argument about truth. Sending that message the most effective way you specifically can give it requires honesty and faithfulness to your truth and what you most want to say.
When you consider your audience, if you’re thinking about how you can tell a story that brings about a specific outcome in your readers, your focus moves away from honestly sharing your truth to gaming how you can get your audience to accept it.
With your truth, if you go into it thinking that you’re telling your audience “This was true for me, so it’s true for you, too,” that invites so much self-doubt and what-ifs about how your story will be received by individual readers. It’s not going to be received by everyone, so just try to be honest about what you believe to be true.
“I believe this, and this is how I learned it.”
