Graphic by Peg Ihinger
One of the first things a lot of writers get told is to “think about your audience” or “imagine your ideal reader.”
This is one of those balancing-act bits of advice. I personally think there are more down sides than up sides, but either way, the fact remains that audience matters. If you are writing for a particular genre, you need to be familiar enough with it to know what the conventions are, because that’s what the audience expects. Romance novels need to have a romance at the center of the story; murder mysteries usually require someone to solve a murder (or at least, a disappearance that is thought to be a murder); horror novel have to be horrifying (for reasons other than clumsy writing); fantasy needs some kind of connection to magic; and so on.
There is more to it than that, though. “Head-hopping” is sneered at by many (if not most) science fiction and fantasy readers, but it is a more respectable (and sometimes encouraged) technique among Romance readers and writers. Books for a middle-school or earlier age group expect vocabulary and chapter lengths suitable for the target age group/reading level. And there are more individual and personal matters, such as what the audience can be expected to know; whether the target readers who like their stories fast-paced or not, free-wheeling or stylized, long or short, full of lyrical details or spare Hemingway-esque sentences, and so on. You can get away with defying some of these expectations, some of the time…but the more basic they are and the more of them you ignore, the better the story is going to have to be to get people to read it anyway.
Which leads to the main problem with “imagining your ideal reader”: the people who read your books are never exactly like the audience in your head. Real readers are seldom cut-and-dried in their tastes, and most can’t articulate what they do want, except perhaps as “not quite this thing you gave me” or “something exactly like your last book only different but not really.”
Furthermore, once you put your book out there in the world, it is not going to be available only to those “ideal readers” that make up the audience in your head. Lots of other people are going to find it, too. Many of them will read it, and the book will inevitably disappoint or annoy at least some of them. The internet being what it is, many will express their disappointment. Loudly. If you base your writing strategy on pleasing an ideal reader, you will very likely end up disappointed yourself.
In addition, the audience that reads your stories–even the “ideal” readers–bring their own notions to what they read. I’ve had more than one discussion with individual readers who want to explain to me how I “got the magic wrong” because what I wrote doesn’t fit their very firmly held ideas of how magic ought to work.
Which is why I’ve said a number of times that I don’t “think about my audience” or “imagine my ideal reader.” I certainly don’t do it in those terms. If I had to describe “my audience,” I’d call it “people who like reading the same stuff I like reading.” In other words, I write for myself, and I’m lucky enough that publishers–and readers–like and want to buy it.
This doesn’t mean I don’t make a lot of assumptions about my audience–or that I don’t have to keep a close eye on those assumptions. “Writing for me” means that it is extremely easy for me to assume that my readers will know the same things I know–that they’ll be aware of the same historical events, or that they’ll be coming at things from the same angle I am.
For instance, one of my beta readers once objected to the way fog behaved in one of my books. It should have lasted longer into the morning, or dissipated more unevenly, she thought, especially “as it rises into the higher elevations.”
I have lived on the Great Plains all my life. My experience of morning fog is that we get it maybe four or five times a year, and it burns off by 9 a.m. at the absolute latest. Also, I’d never heard anyone refer to “higher elevations” until I visited California as an adult.
My default assumptions about the weather are built on mid-continental flatlands. When I set a story in a different sort of landscape, I have to consciously think about the fact that they’ll have more rain, less cold, fewer extremes on either end of the temperature, or whatever the differences are from the weather I’m used to.
But I also have to remember those differences when I’m writing a place that does have a mid-continental climate, because I need to remember to describe what I’m used to in a way that will get it across to people who have never lived in a similar place, who therefore have very different expectations about what should be happening, and who may not have any idea what “a thunderstorm looming on the horizon” looks like (because it’s not something you get to see if you grew up in the woods, or in a valley between mountains, or anywhere else where the horizon isn’t immediately visible because there’s stuff in the way).
This doesn’t just apply to things like weather or landscape. My actual audience–the real people who read my books–is inevitably going to include a lot of people who have different experiences of many everyday things, from how big a family should be, to what is “cheap food” vs. “fancy, expensive food,” to what is considered polite behavior at a wedding or funeral. And even though I “write for myself,” I would still like those people to read my work, which means providing details that will, at the least, let them know whenever the characters’ “normal” experience isn’t quite the same as whatever they are expecting.
I just wanted to mention that “know your audience” is absolutely crucial if you’re writing non-fiction. Are you composing a teaching aid or textbook? Is it for adults or younger? Or is the work a briefing for executives? Or one for your colleagues, who know the same broad strokes and minutiae as you do? How about a biography for the general public? Makes a huge difference.
Fiction? I don’t think I can add anything to what our hostess has written.
Come to think of it, I can add something. Lois McMaster Bujold talks at length about it in her Sidelines, Talks and Essays (very, very worth reading, even for non-authors), but to sum it up in a way that won’t have her come after me for copyright violation 😉 –
* Don’t give sf readers a romance novel. *
So if you don’t know [the genre conventions] your audience [is expecting], you can disappoint your readers mightily.
Now now, Kevin…
This is a misquote, or misunderstanding. It was merely IF you give your readers a story that thwarts their rigid genre expectations gained from the book’s packaging or buzz, you can expect (some of) them to whinge about it.
Reasonable enough. If you are in a restaurant and order cake, but are served pie, you’d be upset. But as I have occasionally pointed out, I am a writer, not a short-order cook.
If I had ever actually followed that dictum, my books and career would not exist as they are at present.
There was a reader review I ran across just last week that was having just that sort of whinge about The Warrior’s Apprentice not fitting their expectations of military SF (which it’s not — it’s a character study) — nearly 40 years on from the book’s first publication. The important takeaway from that is not the whinge — but the 40 years.
(Also, short direct quotes used for the purposes of review or discussion are explicitly not a copyright violation. You don’t even have to ask. Now, if you are incorporating such into your own work as, say, chapter headers, you do need to get formal permissions.)
Ta, Lois.
I would rather risk saying too little than draw the ire of a favorite author!!!! 🙂
Besides, I was trying to plug Sidelines for you. (It really is worth reading, I need to read it a fourth time soon.)
Heh. I am much too lazy (or possibly tired) for much ire these days. Though the Urge to Correct is still pretty ingrained.
But one of the early discoveries of my career is that there are no genre police, who will come in the night and arrest you for coloring outside the lines. It was a very freeing realization.
Also, every reader will construct your same text into a different or very different story from the materials inside their heads. (As Pat touches on above with her “what the reader knows” point.) Readings are always going to be a fuzzy set. The best one can hope for is to herd most of them to the same destination somehow, although there will always be outliers who end up climbing the canyon walls or strayed into a bog of their own making.
Some of my own micro-editing is devoted to trying to suss out where my text can be legitimately misread, and by word-choice or syntax trying to cut such off at the pass. That said, there will always be someone *cough* who pictures Ivan as blond, no matter how many times I mention his dark hair, or Taura as furry, even though I describe her skin as normal-human.
Also… it helps to realize that the general public is not your crit group. This wasn’t a problem in the Old Days, because even published writers had almost no contact with the public; it’s a post-internet hazard. It was a challenge to transition from feedback famine to feedback glut.
Anyway, thanks for the plug! I mostly just leave my books out for folks to fall over, these days (see, “lazy”, above) but strewing a few tree roots about never hurts.
Ta, L.
There are times when I feel like there are only three readers who would like the particular sort of stuff that I write – and I don’t know who the other two are. Then there are other times when I feel that there’s a significant audience out there for the particular sort of stuff that I write, if only I could reach them.
I think it’s unquestionably useful to ask what your reader *knows*–both, what have you gotten across to them in your writing, and what background knowledge are they likely to have?
The first readers of my previous project both agreed that they’d read right past an important point and then been surprised (not in a good way) when it came up again later. I hadn’t appreciated how the very brief description was de-emphasizing its importance for the reader.
Asking what your hypothetical reader *likes* is harder and more fraught. I can’t do much of it.
On the plus side, once you start thinking hard about what kind of assumptions you and your characters are making, then you can have fun writing about characters with incompatible assumptions, and you can tailor it from small-scale differences over what counts as a suitable Christmas present, all the way up to major culture clash. But possibly other people are less enthusiastic about writing culture clashes than I am.
I find the concept of “target audience” very helpful for making certain kinds of decisions. Do I include more spy stuff, or less? Do I restrain my fondness for alliteration or cut loose with all the alliteration I can assemble? Often it’s a question of making a small group of readers extremely happy at the cost of potentially not connecting with a larger group — which is an easier choice to make when one is not under contract, etc.