Speaking to the Audience
Apr. 25th, 2004 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serafina20Yesterday at the Festival of Books, I went to a panel on Poetry. One of the questions was writing to the audience or what sort of audience you envision while writing. Afterwards, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nebt_het and I were talking about it, and she unfortunatly had to endure me going all over the place in ways I'm sure didn't make sense, but the questions is really intersting to me. I write a lot, and at various times I've done prose, poetry, and fan fiction (which I know is prose, but it's a different kind of writing for me).
When I write poetry, I have no audience. The audience is me, and if the audience isn't me, then I'm never happy with the poem. I cam not confident enough in my self-expression in this form to think that anything I say will be very effective. I think in a very straight forward way in the way I put words together. I will probably never be lyrical or stylistic, and the poems I'm happiest with are the ones that are meant to be read aloud. The person (me) helps give the poem it's meaning.
With novels, I have a general idea of my audience. In terms of content, especially with "Dark Goddess" or whatever it'll be called now that it has about 3 distinct plot threads running through it, the audience is about the same as Laurell K. Hamiltons. I'm not sure of the face of that audience, even having been to a reading of hers and being part of that audience, but I know what I can "get away" with, somewhat.
But, at the same time,I can't think of the audience or the publishers too much. The guiding line to me is, "Will someone be able to understand this?" I have almost all the information when I'm writing, although, through the process of discovery, there's always more that pops up. My main goal in visualising my readers is wondering if there's the right mix of mystery and comprehensible input to keep them reading.
With fan fiction, I nkow my audience, and that's part of the fun. I post, I get feedback, I write back. The longer I write and the more complicated either the series (COTW) gets, or the WIP (Reporter!Lex), the more readers (sageness and sabershadowkat especially) start to influence what goes on. By sharing thoughts, feelings, reactions, and speculations with me, new avenues that sometimes I haven't thought of open up. So the plots change and adapt based on these new thoughts.
And I think that's why I tend to write fanfiction more and find it more enjoyable. Instead of it being a converstation in which I don't know who I'm talking to, I do know the people online, somewhat, and that motivates me a lot more.
nebt_het and I were talking about it, and she unfortunatly had to endure me going all over the place in ways I'm sure didn't make sense, but the questions is really intersting to me. I write a lot, and at various times I've done prose, poetry, and fan fiction (which I know is prose, but it's a different kind of writing for me).When I write poetry, I have no audience. The audience is me, and if the audience isn't me, then I'm never happy with the poem. I cam not confident enough in my self-expression in this form to think that anything I say will be very effective. I think in a very straight forward way in the way I put words together. I will probably never be lyrical or stylistic, and the poems I'm happiest with are the ones that are meant to be read aloud. The person (me) helps give the poem it's meaning.
With novels, I have a general idea of my audience. In terms of content, especially with "Dark Goddess" or whatever it'll be called now that it has about 3 distinct plot threads running through it, the audience is about the same as Laurell K. Hamiltons. I'm not sure of the face of that audience, even having been to a reading of hers and being part of that audience, but I know what I can "get away" with, somewhat.
But, at the same time,I can't think of the audience or the publishers too much. The guiding line to me is, "Will someone be able to understand this?" I have almost all the information when I'm writing, although, through the process of discovery, there's always more that pops up. My main goal in visualising my readers is wondering if there's the right mix of mystery and comprehensible input to keep them reading.
With fan fiction, I nkow my audience, and that's part of the fun. I post, I get feedback, I write back. The longer I write and the more complicated either the series (COTW) gets, or the WIP (Reporter!Lex), the more readers (
sageness and sabershadowkat especially) start to influence what goes on. By sharing thoughts, feelings, reactions, and speculations with me, new avenues that sometimes I haven't thought of open up. So the plots change and adapt based on these new thoughts. And I think that's why I tend to write fanfiction more and find it more enjoyable. Instead of it being a converstation in which I don't know who I'm talking to, I do know the people online, somewhat, and that motivates me a lot more.
