Pre-writing: Your Audience
Hello Neophyte, still enjoying the broom closet? … yes, I know, I know. I won’t be able to keep you in there much longer, but I will think of something. Until then, we shall continue our lessons as if it were normal. Only that today won’t be normal because, for one, we are discussing a hard rule of the craft. Yes, I am serious. This is something that you should follow to the letter. Something so basic, so fundamental that it, along with keeping the willing suspension of disbelief, is part of the natural law of the land. Something that brooks no argument and no discussion, and that is your Audience.
I know because I have been there, at the beginning of learning the craft. Bright-eyed and full of hope and optimism. I still have hope but optimism has been swept away by the grind of reality and what that grind has taught me, along with my own personal journey of self-study, is that one of the things you should research and pay close attention to is who you are writing for. If you are writing for yourself and just yourself, then go crazy, do whatever you like. But if you are writing something for publication of any kind, the target audience is something that you should research on how to actually write for.
What do I mean by this? Well, Neophyte, let’s start with kids, yes, with the youngest group that can actually read and enjoy reading. Though it may appear that they are the easiest demographic to cater to, they are actually the hardest. Why? Because framing something from the point of view of a child is one of the hardest things an adult can do. By the time you have grown, your child years are a lifetime away, remembered in a nostalgic manner but never in a factual one; therefore, producing something for that age group is tricky, to say the least. It requires intelligence and a deep understanding of both writing and the minds of children to produce something that will grip them and force them to think.
I still remember my first at a young age, “Word of Ghost” by Carlos Rodriguez (disclaimer: I am translating the title to English “Palabra de Fantasma” because I don’t know if the book has been officially translated). It is a tale about a group of teenagers in a summer camp that need to help free a ghost by telling stories. But not just any stories, hard and painful stories about themselves and their fears. I vividly remember the very first time I read it; it was an experience that I will never be able to fully replicate. I read it again recently, and I blazed through it in about a few hours over a few days. Clearly, it was not the same.
Where am I going with this example? Well, Neophyte, if you can forgive the ramblings of this adult who complains about being old but knows damn well that he is not, what I want to say is that the book is simple, both in language and narrative. An adult can blitz through it without thinking, but a child or a pre-teen cannot. Even though it is simple, it carries a lot of weight—things that are simple for adults but complicated for children are told beautifully through its lines. The one difference was that I saw several themes that flew under my radar the first time I read it, and that is understandable. A child or pre-teen just isn’t capable of understanding the same things as an adult, but they are surprisingly aware, and not respecting that capacity and capability is an insult that cannot be forgiven. That is why a lot of skill is required to write for them because one has to write a lot of complicated stuff in simple terms. No easy task, especially if you went through higher education, where they are high on their own farts.
The next significant age group is teenagers and young adults, oh boy, they have been at the forefront of the industry for the last decade or so. They are also responsible for a lot of the cliches and recurrent tropes in writing for at least a decade. Every teen drama, every dystopic/apocalyptic tale somehow requires teenagers to solve their problems while the adults fumble through being dumb. I used to laugh, but I was also a twat that read the works of people like Alejandro Dumas at 15. I am not laughing anymore; I am understanding. Understanding that the teenage years are… complicated. Yes, I know Neophyte, that is a quaint way of putting it, but it is the truth. A time of passage, where you are coming to grips with life, where everything is changing, and you only just noticed. Is it a wonder that a lot of their stories are about a post-apocalyptic world in need of saving? More to the point, their stories don’t seem smart on the surface; heck, they seem quite stupid at times, characters listening to their emotions before they listen to their minds or common sense… in an adult book, those characters are the ones who suffer the most. But let me remind you, Neophyte, who is the target audience here? Yes, teenagers, and how are teenagers as an age group? Much like the characters in their favorites stories. If there is a lot of nonsense in those books, it’s because there is a lot of nonsense in teenagers’ lives. Everything at that age changes, including their bodies. Is it so strange now? It is not. To write for them is to embrace a lot of nonsense, a lot of crazy. It is to have the skill and wisdom to straddle the line between the world of adults and the world of children. To have elements of both well-developed and well-placed, balanced. A challenge, to be sure, but not an insurmountable one and far simpler than writing for actual children, at least in theory. This is also true for young adults; they may be facing the real world, just beginning to do so, in fact, but they still retain things of their younger years, so that has to be taken into account.
Then there is the fact that for many, literature is a fixed thing in a world of change, something that they can rely on during hard times. I know it was for me, so you may blame those stories for being simple, but they are what their audience needs them to be.
Which is an easy segue into adults, and here is a broad spectrum of options, Neophyte, much of which will depend on your own preferences as a reader and skills as an author. For the previous age brackets, what I am about to say applies, though what I already described is more at the forefront than this, which is nonetheless important.
They are the easiest to write to, why? At least in my experience. Because what you want to write is not conditioned by the level of your target audience but what they expect. Do you want to write a gritty, dark, and convoluted detective story? Go right ahead. Or, you may not like them, but you are good at writing romance novels? Go at it. Your limit here is the nuance of what the readership expects, of the respect that you give them and of the Genre that you are writing on.
Genre, of the literature variety, is the force that will mainly condition you while you write for adults. Avid readers come to expect certain things out of their favorite genre. Things that should remain unchanging and unmovable. Does that mean that you cannot innovate? No, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that a certain predictability is expected out of genre-specific authors, not the same thing every time but repeated beats that rhyme. It’s the same in music; a metal song may touch upon the same themes as a pop song but they have different bases that enjoy different things, and metalheads expect certain things out of their favorite music genre, chiefly among them that it remains metal.
That is why a neat little trick that I have found, Neophyte, a shortcut, is to just research what an audience expects from a certain genre; it’s a nice prepackaged toolkit for what to do.
There are always outliers, remember I was one of them reading long and complicated books at 15, but outliers are exceptions and not a rule.
So to recap, part of the pre-writing audience is the proper research of what type of audience you will have, for they will determine how and what you write. And not every audience is made equal. I placed adults as a whole, but there is a difference between age brackets, the details of which we will discuss later.
I hope that was enough for now, now back to the broom closet. C’mon chop chop Neophyte.
Until Next Time
