No, you can´t control your audience
Hello Timmy, today we are dealing with an aspect of the craft that many grapple with, mostly out of fear and insecurity. Yes, there are the Corpos (corporations) too. When you sit down to work on the craft, you can only control what you are able to, no more and no less. But we are humans— insecure, feeble-minded, and weak. We are so thoroughly convinced that we can control the future by the mere power of our minds that we sometimes let ourselves rot around us without doing anything about it.
The same is true in the craft. I would bet a pint of beer against a dung heap that at least one person has either never tried or given up because they fear how their efforts would be received. Heck, there are probably many who have struggled with writing by trying to accommodate all their fears in it, thus trying to control how the audience would receive it.
Timmy, I am here to give you a reality check: you can’t. The need to control comes, from my experience, from fear, at least in this case. We fear and thus try to control, as if that is going to dampen the feeling. Giving in to controls only nurtures the fear, and a feeling that you nurture is a feeling that never goes away. The more you try to control your audience while you write your countless drafts or by tailoring your work 100% toward your audience, the more you will achieve nothing. You may end up with something that has value, but that value will be questionable at best and bad at worst.
This goes for Corpos as well. I have said before that many corporate works succeed only on the merits of their sheer resources. If they feel dead and empty, it is because they are. Corpos don’t have businesses or works but portfolios and brands with value that goes up or down, and the only thing they care about is to increase the value of their portfolio. They care for nothing else. Creativity is not to be fostered but to be used and discarded when and if convenient.
By writing, you are exposing yourself one way or the other, whether you like it or not. Why, you ask Timmy? Because writing implies putting a little bit of yourself out there through your work, and that is what you fear under everything else, am I right? Yeah, I am right.
At the end of the day, all that is left is you and the blank page. Good luck!
Until next time..
