Can you write for a general audience anymore?
Or are the lanes narrowing?
Imagine that you and your fiancé attend a holiday party. Your fiancé leaves to find the restroom. While you wait at the punch bowl, a gorgeous stranger introduces themself. You both are intensely attracted to one another. They have the same occupation as you. You drift into a corner, away from the crowd. The stranger hands you a slip of paper. It says “Radisson, Room 202.” At that moment, your fiancé reappears.
How would you relive this holiday party with your best friend, the person in your life who requires no filter? Men, how would you recall this event (if at all) if you were describing it to your mother — women, to your father? How might you retell the story to a pastor, rabbi, or priest, assuming that you accept them as a spiritual mentor? And, perhaps most importantly, how would you explain what happened to your fiancé, who presumably wants to know who that stranger is and why they are briskly walking away? Think about which details you might include or omit in each retelling and how your tone might change for each audience.
I can’t remember who I borrowed this scenario from, but I’ve used it for years to illustrate the concept of writing to audience. It is extreme on purpose, but I can imagine a dozen more realistic variations. More than ever, our texts and emails and phone conversations — even the ways we speak in public — vary depending on our audience, or on who we think might be listening. Flip the topic to a sensitive subject, and even on a playground, watching our kids play in the open air, our voices might grow hushed.
Most people would not only trust a best friend with every detail about the holiday party, they might even embellish the tale. Who doesn’t want to know they still have it, no matter how happily partnered they are? Relationships with parents are more variable, but given the choice I would not relate any of this experience to my mother, even though we are close. If I had no choice but to describe the party to her, my tone would be flat and I’d omit the attraction and the note: this would be a story about meeting a colleague. Nothing to see here. If I were still religious, it’s possible that my tone might be more contrite, depending on whether I felt I had something to confess, or proud, if I felt I’d handled myself well. And I suspect that the version most of us would tell our fiancés would be much like the one I’d tell my mother: not dishonest, just selective and downplayed.
One of my students once claimed that he wouldn’t filter any of it with anyone, not even his fiancé. “I’d say ‘Yeah, she was hot, but I’m with you,’” he said. His name was Adam Carriker, and he was a standout defensive end for the Nebraska Cornhuskers and, eventually, a first-round NFL draft pick. I guess if you stand 6’ 6” and weigh 300 pounds, you don’t trouble yourself too much about your audience — your audience troubles itself about you.
But most of us would feel that there was a lot at stake with each of these choices. We’d be anticipating how each audience might respond, whether we’d be judged or believed and whether we’d upset someone. And we’d be conscious of the “cocktail party rule” — the point at which our listener would lose interest and start looking for the next drink. These are exaggerated versions of the choices that serious writers make during revision to make their work more enjoyable and accessible.
Learning how to anticipate an imaginary reader’s responses changed everything for me as a scholar and as a creative writer. William Cronon captures the traditional concept well: “[E]ducated people know the craft of putting words on paper. I'm not talking about parsing a sentence or composing a paragraph, but about expressing what is in their minds and hearts so as to teach, persuade, and move the person who reads their words. I am talking about writing as a form of touching, akin to the touching that happens in an exhilarating conversation.”
A writer with a sense of audience exercises restraint, shifts description away from adjectives and adverbs into nouns and verbs, and avoids clichés. Such a writer understands Annie Dillard’s principle that memoir ought to be more than “airing grievances,” that self-scrutiny is required if others are examined critically. I learned early in my writing apprenticeship that these choices had the power to bridge the gap between myself and others in ways that I’d never been able to manage as a child. R.T. Smith, the long-time editor of the literary journal Shenandoah, confessed to me that he didn’t much like baseball, but my essay comparing Little League to the revival meetings I grew up attending overcame his indifference to the sport. There has always been something magical about sending a piece to a group of strangers in New York City or Los Angeles, or to a journal in Lexington, Virginia, and knowing that the work came alive for them despite the enormous gulf between our worlds.
As a child, I felt that my prayers went nowhere, that they stayed stubbornly in the room with me. You might say that writing became a different form of prayer and that learning how to reach a broader audience gave me the power to ensure that those prayers were answered. But I’m beginning to wonder if the way I learned to write for an audience might be fading. Audience matters more than ever in a world concerned with demand and market share. It’s that the transformative power of writing — the ability to change a reader through craft — seems to be on the wane.
I’m not sure where I first got the impression that ambitious writing ought to be difficult to read. One of my graduate professors remarked, of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s more obscure verse, that there were maybe five people in England who could understand it. I remember feeling inspired by that somehow. But I had long understood that people-pleasers like Longfellow were irrelevant before they were dead, whereas visionaries like Melville struggled in obscurity and thus earned readers willing to toil, worshipfully, through their muck. Many of those readers were professors or professors-in-training whose job depended, in part, on content that required explanation.
I was one of them when I took a course in creative nonfiction with Ted Kooser. (Ted, if you are reading this, thank you) He taught the class by tutorial: one-on-one every Tuesday for 30 minutes. My job was to bring some new pages every time we met. He’d read them on the spot, and we’d talk a bit, and then he’d take them home for a closer look and return them with detailed comments.
Initially it didn’t seem to be going well. I resisted Ted’s suggestions, thinking he just didn’t get my symbolism and learned allusions. But there was something about that weekly face-to-face that chipped away at my armor. And then, in a moment, everything changed. It was a single word, “overcooked,” scrawled in the margin of an essay about firefighting.
The scene was sunrise in a fire camp, and I’d described everything inside my tent: the cocoon of warmth in the mummy bag, the glow of the tent dome, the smell of wood smoke in my clothes. Then — for reasons that escape me now — I revealed that I was wearing black underwear. I’d never have shared that detail with a stranger on the next bar stool, but I had no filter yet in prose. “Overcooked.” As I read the note, I could almost picture Ted grimacing as if I’d stunk up his office. My face reddened, even though I sat alone at my desk. It was the first time I understood on a visceral level what it meant to lose a reader’s sympathy.
Ted has a simpler and possibly more civilized metaphor for audience than my opening scenario. In his Poetry Home Repair Manual, he imagines a poem as a stranger on our doorstep: “As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or not to invite it into our lives.” Too much pretense, rawness, or redundancy, and the reader shuts the door in the poem’s face. But even if the reader invites the poem in, “it may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed.” An essay crafted with a reader in mind is not merely a more suitable house guest, it is more likely to become an enduring part of a reader’s life.
One problem with the audience concept, however, is that there is no objective standard for what makes a poem a good house guest. Shelley was capable of writing more accessibly — “Ozymandias” is a lovely example — but he wrote some of his poems for elite peers who could understand him and who wouldn’t glaze over at his obscurity. A fair bit of classic literature is insider baseball of this sort. Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Jane Austen emphasized money and marriage because those were the chief preoccupations of their bourgeois readership, but this made their work almost indigestible to me as a working-class college student. In fact, all those years when I imagined that writing was, above all, the art of self-expression, and that I just needed to remain true to my instincts until I was discovered, I could have claimed that I was writing for a reader I hadn’t found yet.
Ted’s idea of audience is more democratic. It assumes that any artist can, by thinking about a reader’s needs above their own, reach a broader swath of the public. But the very notion of a house guest assumes a general code of manners by which a stranger might endear themself to another stranger. The metaphor depends upon a definition of society that is steadily unraveling.
For instance, the books I loved as a child were written for a general audience in a time when people might actually imagine a stranger on their doorstep as a potential guest. The Chronicles of Narnia and The Wind in the Willows are not dumbed down, but they are friendly to readers. They don’t bog down in cryptic allusions. My four-year-old son listens just as raptly to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as my ten-year-old daughter, even though he does not possess her knowledge of dryads and naiads. There is enough sensory detail and narrative urgency to keep him entranced even when he misses a word like “hansom” or “waistcoat.”
But I am aware, as I read aloud to my children, that Lewis’s world is patriarchal and gender normative, that it defaults to Christianity, and that these features — in our present milieu — are as alienating to many readers as they are endearing to others. If Lewis were writing today, he’d have to pick a side, and his prose would likely reflect that more defiant stance. It is possible that some churches still preach a version of heaven similar to Lewis’s, where all seekers end up in Aslan’s country. But our age often requires us to pick a lane, if we haven’t already chosen one for ourselves. Sometimes it does so posthumously — just ask the ghost of Roald Dahl. The default now is more akin to fight or flight. Is that stranger on the doorstep an ally or an enemy?
Perhaps it is that Ted’s house guest metaphor still applies, but identity has taken the place of craft. Some readers open the door of the book and gaze not into the face of the poem but into the face of the poet before deciding whether to invite the work into their lives. You, dear readers, seem to defy this, since many of you are not my demographic twins. I’d like to think that craft, and not theme, is what holds you. And yet I cannot ignore the power of affinity groups in mobilizing Substack communities. Is it the prose or the troubled state of academe that binds us together?
Online presence, or virtual identity, now supersedes craft in publishing. Lucinda Literary explicitly states that memoir writers need at least 10,000 followers on a social media platform to even be considered by commercial publishers. Craft has nothing to do with clearing the first hurdle; it is just crass market share: “[I]f you’re writing your life story, how will a publisher know there’s an audience to be had, if they can’t see evidence of an audience that exists?” The answer to this once lay in the originality of the prose or the power of the story, not the celebrity of its teller. Ted is an interesting counterpoint to such nakedly opportunistic reasoning, since he was not widely known until he was named the 13th U.S. Poet Laureate and then won the Pulitzer the following year (which prompted a classmate to tape posters around the English building that said, “Kooser for Pope!”). He had published many volumes of poetry with tiny distributions before then, and it was the integrity of the work, not merely his celebrity, that caused sales for those earlier volumes to soar. Some publishers are growing more skeptical about the value of raw follower count, but not because they are changing their priorities. Instead, they’re just drilling down for proof of comments, shares, and other forms of engagement that promise a return on investment. Assuredly there are many other Ted Koosers living today who are masters of craft but novices at self-promotion, and it is everyone’s loss that they remain obscure.
One of the more democratic storytelling venues is The Moth. Identity matters in their selection process, but craft seems to be more important. In fact, there is a Moth method to storytelling that is much like the internalized sense of craft that I learned from Ted: you can study it for yourself in How to Tell a Story. Even so, the good people at The Moth have some “don’ts” that would rule out a lot of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and literary memoirs like Tobias Wolff’s or Mary Karr’s. Such as this one: “Please don’t use another’s identity as a prop or plot point. (If you choose to include another person’s race, orientation, physical appearance or able-bodiedness, be sure that it is intrinsic to the story).”
Kudos to them for stating these dealbreakers so plainly. But the difference between a prop (or a slur) and an intrinsic story element is a judgment call that frequently depends on how much power the character in question is perceived to have. Another form that this particular judgment takes is the phrase “that is not your story to tell.” To write with an imaginary reader in mind today is to juggle dozens of choices like this. Some of these choices are binary: choose one way, and many readers will simply not invite you into their house, no matter how charming or polished your prose might be.
I have been wrestling of late with how much overlap there might be between “that is not your story to tell” and perceived market appeal. I recently spoke with an established writer, more celebrated for his poetry, who grew up in the South and has an idea for a memoir. But he has ruled it out because “no one wants to hear that story from me.” This may well be a practical calculation — why spend a year or more toiling on a manuscript that no agent or publisher will give the time of day. But poets are lucky if their readers number in the dozens. If this memoir were lyrically and powerfully told, as I’ve no doubt it would be, why would it not be as worthy of the author’s time and attention as his ample body of verse? It seems that he is imagining the reader opening the door of the book, seeing his face, and instinctively turning away.
Stephen King suggests, in his excellent book On Writing, that a first draft is for telling the story to ourselves. He calls this “writing with the door shut.” We follow our enthusiasm as far as it can take us and pay attention only to those burning questions we want to answer or those characters who continue to surprise us with their ingenuity. We trust that satisfying our own curiosity or hunger will have value to others. Then, once we are ready for revision, we look at our narrative with the “door open,” attuned to those moments that might confuse or bore a reader — in effect, the house guest idea. I have sometimes explained the concept to students by comparing a draft to their dorm room. The level of clutter you’re able to live with in private is quite different from the mess you’ll allow in your dwelling place if you expect company. The house guest idea works equally well whether you imagine the reader or the literary work standing on the doorstep.
But what my friend was saying was, “No matter how well I write this story, no matter how purely I satisfy my artistic hunger, there would be no point in opening the door to readers. No matter how tidy it was, once they saw me, they would never come in.” I’m not sure what the word is for my friend’s mindset, but it turns everything I know about audience as a revision tool on its head.
The audience principle features prominently on Substack: the extent to which this platform encourages writers to narrow their focus and stay in that lane. If I were driven by the market imperative, I would write nothing but polemics. The stats don’t lie: that is what readers want from me, what I am rewarded for. But there is a deep media playbook on sparking outrage that far predates Substack and that I would prefer to avoid. I’d prefer to engage the neocortex, not the amygdala. Critique, according to my personal code, must begin with a principled stance, not a cynical market motive. Yet there is a clear choice between reaching an audience while satisfying my sometimes eclectic interests and tailoring my focus to what readers demonstrably prefer. This raises a more difficult question of how much I am willing to concede to my prospective reader-hosts: what my own list of dealbreakers might be.
I still believe it is possible to touch someone through writing who did not expect to be touched, who would not imagine themself to be in my affinity group if they saw me on the subway, who might have thought that their mind was made up about me. This is the current against which my boat beats, even if my understanding of craft feels ceaselessly borne back into the past.
My friend
agrees in today's post for . For more on this subject, read Mary's essay "Moral Ambiguity" on the reasons for making art.Should you wish to explore the audience concept further with me, I’ll be offering a four-week online course through Writing Workshops every Tuesday from March 14 — April 4. Lessons will feature defamiliarization, urgency, nuance, and concision: all tools that I have found essential for engaging a public readership. See the course page for details about each week.
Scroll down for full course details at Writing Workshops.
You offer a passage that captures something that took me a long time to learn ... admittedly not until my mid 30s.
“As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or not to invite it into our lives.” Too much pretense, rawness, or redundancy, and the reader shuts the door in the poem’s face. But even if the reader invites the poem in, “it may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed.”
That's one of the best succinct descriptions I've ever seen.
Personally, I still tend to commit the sin of "rawness," though not from ignorance.
Some unusual audience feedback. Since you're talking so much about audiences. I tend to take at least 30 minutes to read a column, and usually come back to it two or three times. I write a lot of comments, like a conversation, and actually post about half of them. I suspect that's not a typical reading pattern.
There is loads here I could comment on but I wish to restrict myself to just a couple.
Firstly, the idea of a reader inviting you into their home is a great metaphor. I've long felt that to be the case, in effect, but the other way round, ie as a reader. For example, call me a prude, but when I see books or blog posts with the word "f*ck* in the title my immediate response is: why would I want that so-called writing polluting my home? I mean, if you came into my house and started swearing I'd ask you to stop, and if you didn't I'd ask you to leave. I realise that in some cases it can be humorous, or to illustrate justifiable anger, and that's fair enough. But if it's a cynical ploy to draw in more readers through outrage, or simply because the writer is inarticulate, I'm not interested. People's time, and their space, are sacrosanct and should be treated accordingly. In I think an analogous way, I read once that the Lebanese poet Gibran was once given a prize for his beautiful writing in English. Someone asked him how he was able to achieve that, given that English wasn't his first language, and he replied something to the effect of "When one is a guest in another person's house one obeys the rules"
Secondly, I don't know your friend, obviously, but his view that potential readers would slam the door in his face seems to me to be depriving some readers of something they would love. I suppose I can understand it from an economic point of view: why spend a year labouring over something that is going to bring in little or no money? But he also seems to be second guessing what the rest of the world will think. Isn't that, in a strange kind of way, immensely egotistical?
On a more general point, writing for a particular audience (a niche audience) is definitely a good way of building up a readership. It's certainly what Substack recommends. However, I've done that with other (non-Substack) newsletters, and I decided that I wanted to use my Substack one to write about stuff I'm interested in, which could range from literature to a strange sign I saw on a bus stop. I'm slowly but surely building up a decent sized and engaged readership. Ultimately, as someone in the Substack office hours said last Thursday, you (as in the writer) are the niche, the unique 'thing' for want of a better word. So I suppose going back to your analogy, I write for myself, and hope that some people will open the door to me!