On Writing For Myself Or A Target Audience

17 9月 2024

Anonymous User asked:

this might sound like a strange question, but when you write, would you say you have a target audience, or do you write solely to express your passion and interest in the subjects you enjoy with little concern for who your audience is?

While I always lean toward the latter in theory, I do create a target audience in my mind. I've been influenced by Umberto Eco's notion of the "ideal reader" where he sees the reader being structured by the texts the reader reads.

In practice, I choose my topics with little regard for the audience. But I also make sure that what I write is easy to understand, and I don't use jargon unless it's necessary. Rather than following literary criticism's "use theory to explain fiction," I tend toward "use fiction to explain theory" (though admittedly every writer bounces back and forth on this dynamic -- or as Marxists and Hegelians would put it, it's a dialectical relationship).

Lately, I've been influenced by writers who publish political and social criticism in Verso and Pluto books because they often propose radical ideas about how to fight for an anti-capitalist future. That's not an easy task if you're not sure about their ideas (I'm still digesting Empire of Normality's ideas). So while I'm reading them and thinking about the world we're in, I'm also interrogating their rhetorical techniques and how persuasive they are.

I think passion doesn't have to be a naive position. It can be as political and critical as you want; it just depends on how much you want to read into a work. This is the same reason I write about political theory books I've read from time to time; fiction is written by people who live in cultural and political contexts, so it makes sense to read about history and critical theory, and then comment the connections and contradictions between theories and fictions. Passion can be articulate and allow readers to be impassioned by the criticism they read -- ideally, I want people to open their minds to these new imagined worlds, or at least entertain these thoughts.

I want readers to play along with me and think about the ideas and themes brought up in the works I'm writing about. Thinking along with a work seems to be the best approach for my writing style. Sometimes the work will point to new avenues I never considered, and I need to explore this and that... I want to capture the dynamic and liveliness of the subject I am writing about. It can be annoying -- sometimes I find myself trapped in the annals of my bibliographical hell -- but it suggests the power of a work to suggest something more vibrant about it. If a work is provocative enough to make me write about it, I have to respond with the respect it deserves.

This approach is pretty silly, but it's what I do. I know I have a readership, but I imagine that it must be self-selecting and close to what I imagine my "ideal reader" to be. I trust my readers to be as inquisitive as I am, even if they can't follow the work/argument well -- they hold me accountable, and I refuse to treat them as people inferior to me. I imagine that they want the best work from me, and so I must do my best.

So, to answer your question, "yes."