As I wrote last week, it’s important to know your audience – their vocabularies, their interests, their attention spans.
Recently I’ve come across a couple quotes about audience that I love enough to share here:
“I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” – Kurt Vonnegut
Sometimes when I write, I’m just writing to tell a story, with just a general audience of I-don’t-care-who. And sometimes I have a particular group in mind, and sometimes I’m aiming my story at a specific person.
When you write, do you write for a specific person or target group, or are you writing just to write?
As a reader, can you tell if a story is targeted at a specific group? If you’re not in that group, do you keep reading?
