Exercise #27: Audience and Intent
Matthew Salesses, Claire Vaye Watkins, Octavia E. Butler, Michael Ventura, Jim Shepard, Sarah Blake, Jonathan Lethem.
Hi friends,
My craft book Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts comes out in exactly one week, on March 8! Thanks to everyone who’s already preordered a copy: if you haven’t reserved yours yet, you can still do so at your local indie bookseller or wherever you prefer to buy your books. I’m so glad the book is finally almost here, and I can’t wait to get it into your hands.
If you’d like to join me talk about the book or about your own revision and rewriting process, I’ll be on book tour for much of the next two months, with a mix of in-person and virtual events, in both conversational and interactive lecture formats:
March 8, 7pm ET, virtual: “Writing, Revising, and Editing Your Story,” a panel at CityLit Festival with Melissa Febos, Dean Smith, and Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, moderated by Aditya Desai.
March 12, 6pm ET, in-person: “Workshop: The 3-Draft Novel” at the Tucson Festival of Books, Tucson, AZ
March 18, 4pm ET, virtual: “Friday Frontliner” at A Mighty Blaze, with Caroline Leavitt
March 19, 11am ET, virtual: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at the Writer’s League of Texas (book included with registration)
March 22, 7pm ET, in-person/livestreamed: Book launch at the Center for Fiction, Brooklyn, NY, with Benjamin Dreyer
March 23, in-person: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Porter Square Books, Boston, MA, hosted by Grub Street (book included with registration)
March 31, 7pm ET, virtual: Craft Chat at The Writer's Center, Bethesda, MD, with Zach Powers
April 1, virtual: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Tin House (book included with registration)
April 2, in-person, 6pm: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Changing Hands, Phoenix, AZ (book included with paid registration)
April 7, virtual, 7pm ET: Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT, with Melanie Finn
April 8, virtual, 7:30pm ET: Refuse to be Done craft lecture at Charis Books, Atlanta, GA, co-hosted by Lostintheletters, with Scott Daughtridge (book included with registration)
April 14, virtual, 8pm ET: Mystery to Me, Madison, WI, with Michelle Wildgen
April 22, in-person: Lighthouse Writers Workshop Book Project Intensive
April 25, virtual, 6pm ET: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Writing Workshops Dallas (book included with registration)
April 28, virtual, 10pm ET: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Hugo House/Third Place Books (book included with registration)
May 2, virtual, 9pm ET: City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, CA, with Kirstin Chen and Jac Jemc
May 10, virtual, 7pm ET: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at Literary Cleveland (book included with registration)
May 23, virtual, 8pm ET: Refuse to Be Done craft lecture at StoryStudio Chicago (book included with registration)
I’ll be sending a brief email next week to mark the launch as well, probably with a brief bonus exercise on revision and rewriting. (I’ll also update as much of the above info as I can, as more links become available.) In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the essay and exercise below: this month’s is a reflection on the craft implications of audience and intent, something that’s increasingly on my mind as a writer and a teacher.
As always, I hope your writing goes well this month, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Enjoy this month’s exercise, be safe, be kind, and have fun with your reading and writing!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
Phase Six by Jim Shepard. I certainly haven't surveyed the whole field, but so far this is the best pandemic novel I've read since COVID began. A fantastic book about pandemic response teams, the work they do, and the emotional toll it takes. Thanks to Kelly Link for recommending this one on Twitter!
Clean Air by Sarah Blake. Part climate apocalypse, part parenting tale, part murder mystery, Clean Air begins in the aftermath of the Turning, an unexpected climate apocalypse in which the world's trees create so much pollen that it’s impossible to breath. Half the world's population dies, we learn on page one, but Izabel, our protagonist writes: "The resulting world, the world we built from scratch, it's not how I was taught a postapocalyptic world would be. It presents itself like a gift."
Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem. One of my favorite undergrad professors gave me this Lethem novel when I was a student of hers, so I decided to start it again on audio while driving to see her this month, when I returned to my alma mater for a reading. While we were having coffee, I mentioned I'd been listening to it, and she lit up: "I love that book," she said, and I said, "I know, me too, thank you!" A deeply formative read for me, years ago, that on rereading I realized I still remembered almost entirely.
Exercise #27: Audience and Intent
I’m not sure I ever purposely thought about audience when I first started writing, or before I started teaching. (As a teacher, I think about it more every year, because I’ve come to recognize how different my students’ implied audiences might be from mine.) Sure, I imagined having an audience, and sure, I hoped that audience might like my stories and my novels. But for my first few years seriously writing fiction, I didn’t think about who I was writing for—or else I knew I was writing mostly for myself, in part because I started writing at a time when I didn’t have anyone to show what I’d made. I’d dropped out of college, didn’t know any other readers outside my family, and didn’t have a literary community yet.
I found my first community online, in the Zoetrope Writing Workshops and in the comment sections of early 2000s lit blogs. I don’t remember the exact mechanism now, but I think at Zoetrope you had to review and rate five submitted stories in order to submit once. I certainly wanted to have my stories well-reviewed and well-rated—there was, I think, a monthly “scoreboard” of the best-rated stories—but at first I was just excited that someone was reading and responding. Still, I know I was learning about the expectations of that specific community, which also introduced me to the wider world of literary magazines, submission guidelines, and editorial feedback: those expectations probably described the first “audience” I explicitly set out to impress. (Zoetrope is probably also where I learned about flash fiction, and what encouraged me to write a lot of it at a certain point: another move to audience.) Did this community change my ideas about what good fiction was and what I should be writing about, in what way? Almost certainly.
When I went back to college and started taking fiction workshops, I know I wanted my classmates to like my fiction and for my professors to be impressed, but I don’t remember consciously writing toward them—which doesn’t mean I wasn’t subconsciously doing so. Certainly I took what my professors told me was "good writing” very seriously, and did my best to do whatever they taught me in my fiction. Another move away from my “default,” although not necessarily in bad ways: it’s not a bad thing to understand norms and expectations, so you’re consciously working toward it against them.
By the the time I started my MFA, I’d added an in-person writing group in Ann Arbor to my online writing friends. Even better, I didn’t have to leave this writing group while I commuted for grad school: whatever my future grad school classmates or professors thought of my writing, I always had a second opinion waiting, from a different perspective. I’m sure I wrote toward that writing group too, but we were all very different kinds of writers: enmeshed in various indie lit writing worlds, some shared and some not, with compatible but differing aesthetics.
My grad program didn’t have a strong program-level aesthetic: certainly there was no one right way to do anything, and I felt generally encouraged to do whatever kind of work I wanted to do. But this was also the era of the “cone of silence”-style workshop, which meant that your work was usually discussed in-class without context or input from you, with the workshop functioning as a supposedly neutral respondent. (Much has been written, including by the writers I’ll quote below, about the wrongheadedness of this supposition.) Again, I don’t remember writing specifically for or against this audience, but I’m sure I did, at last in small ways.
I do remember bristling once at the suggestion that I had: one semester, we had a particularly terrible visiting writer who never read our stories before workshop, instead having us read them aloud in their entirety during workshop, which took immense amounts of time. I turned in a 12,000-word story during that class, which prompted a classmate to suggest I’d done it just to frustrate or spite this visiting writer. I didn’t write it for HIM, I remember thinking (or perhaps saying), furious at the suggestion. Whoever my audience for that story was, it wasn’t that guy. (Or was it?)
All this, of course, was before I started publishing books. But I was submitting and publishing in magazines regularly in this time, and a lot of our conversations in grad school were about what we imagined editors wanted from our stories, and about what we, as editors of our university’s lit mag, wanted from other people’s fiction. We were developing a theory of how to attract an imagined audience’s attention and how to hold it, even if we rarely thought of what we were doing in those terms. We were, bit by bit, adjusting some of what we did on the page to the imagined wants of an audience we usually hadn’t met yet.
I won’t say that I never doubted that there would be an audience for my fiction—of course I did (of course I still do)—but I’ve been lucky to have someone to show my writing to for a long time now. Inevitably, I’m sure some part of what I’m doing when I write is done in relation to whoever I imagine that person might be: certainly I sometimes hear the voices of my agent or my editors when I write, as well as those of some of my closest writer friends. (I just yesterday remembered a writer friend telling me he hated a certain word I used in a story, a word I loved—a comment he made in, I think, 2009.) But over the years, I’ve gotten better and better at knowing these voices are mostly constructs of my own making: at this stage, almost no one in my creative life is trying to stop me from writing exactly what I want, except me. And I should do everything I can to avoid such negative imagined audiences, whose unreality can’t keep them from being harmful.
As Michael Ventura wrote, in his essay “The Talent of the Room”:
Writers do their selling out consciously, alone in their rooms, where they can’t help but know what they’re doing, adjusting sentence after sentence to what’s saleable, to what the publishers or the editors or the studios want. It takes a while for those adjustments to become reflexes—a long while of whittling away what’s best in yourself.
One solution to this worry about audience being a corrupting influence is to write purely for ourselves, and I’d argue that this is the best place to start and a solid place to stay in for much of the writing process. But most of us also want to be read, which means imagining some audience for the work we produce, and a recognition that each audience might have its own expectations of craft, content, and conventions.
For instance, one of my goals as a writer is to write a novel in each of the genres I love. Each of these genres comes with a set of tropes and conventions, which the expected audience has its own relationship with. One of the pleasures of writing in a genre, I think, is the engagement, fulfillment, and subversion of tropes. As readers, we want to see that the writer knows the “rules” of the genre they’re in—and we want to be surprised by what they do with that knowledge. That’s part of writing toward an audience too.
One of my teachers told me once that a good specific goal was to be the best writer from your specific time and place, writing in the language of whoever you identify as your people. That’s a question of audience too, most likely. I was just reminiscing with my friend Caroline Casey the other day about how much it meant to me to find the work of Michael Martone and Ander Monson, too experimental writers writing about the Midwest and (in Monson’s case) specifically about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where my mom’s family is from. There’s so much in Monson’s Other Electricities that will appeal to a diverse set of readers; there’s also a lot there that is hyper-specific to the peoples and landscapes of the place he and I both share. I was glad to be part of his specific audience, and glad to have his permission-giving example to believe there was a “back home” audience for my work too.
Another way I’ve been thinking about this: when you’re writing about home, do you see yourself as writing for your people or about them, for some other audience? The craft implications of this binary seem legion to me.
One other question I frequently ask friends about their novels-in-progress—a question I also ask myself, about mine—is this: What would it take to make your novel 5% friendlier toward a wide audience? In one friend’s novel, we discussed how a different chaptering strategy might make it easier to follow his complex plot; in my work, I started using quotation marks for dialogue after years of not, which I’m absolutely made Appleseed more accessible than my earlier novels. These 5% moves don’t have to be flinches away from some notion of artistic purity: they are, in my mind at least, an acknowledgment that the novel is meant to be read.
For many writers, all this talk about audience might become a source of anxiety or even writer’s block. You might ask: Will people like what I’m writing? Will they get it? Will it sell or be reviewed well? We imagine trying to get our books past the various gatekeepers between us and the careers we want, ruing in advance the contortions we might put our work through to reach them. Some of this is probably prudent, even necessary in some venues, but none of it feels good. What would a more positive conception of audience entail, and what would it buy us? How can acknowledging or claiming the right audience increase not just our potential readership but our artistic achievement?
Obviously, I’m not the only one thinking about these questions, and I know I haven’t gone as deep into my own concept of audience as some other writers have. For instance, Matthew Salesses’ Craft in the Real World is, to my mind, the best contemporary text on the relationship between audience and craft; in the chapter titled "Audience, Theme, and Purpose," he writes, "You can't control who reads your fiction, but you can control whom you write for."
Similarly, in her Tin House essay "On Pandering," Claire Vaye Watkins asks, "Who am I writing for? Who am I writing toward?" In the essay, Watkins charts her changing thinking about these questions—and I think you can now see the results of that reflection manifested in her latest novel, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, and in how it differs from Battleborn and Gold Fame Citrus.
In her essay "Positive Obsession," Octavia Butler reflected on a childhood spent reading science fiction and fantasy that she loved but that wasn't written by people who shared her identity (or who necessarily saw her as part of their audience), and then an adulthood spent as one of the only publishing Black science fiction writers, something other Black persons questioned the validity of to her face. These are two different kinds of audience experiences: there is the experience of reading a book where it becomes obvious that the writer never imagined a person like you as a member of your audience, and there is experience of having at least part of your intended audience reject or question your work.
In all three of these writers’ reflections, we find different versions of questions we might decide to ask ourselves: Who do I imagine is the ideal reader for the book I'm writing? And what does it or should it change about how I’m writing my book?
And also, perhaps, we might intuit a slightly different line of questioning: Who is the act of my writing for? In other words, when I sit down to write, who does the action serve, before the book is published, or even if it never is?
If you are in the early stages of your writing life, you might also be only in the early stages of being able to answer the above questions. Even if you’ve been writing for a long time, you might find that your answers to these questions have changed over time, sometimes without you realizing it. For myself, I believe that writing intentionally toward and with audience has increasingly become a useful and sustaining part of my own writing practice, especially during the long lonely work of drafting a novel, and especially during the turn in revision where the book goes from being primarily something I’m making for myself to something I’m preparing to give to readers.
Imagining that there is someone out there who the work is for is one reason to finish it—even if that person is only future you. And realizing what the day-to-day practice of writing does for you or for the people in your life might also help you find another reason to persevere at your writing and/or to give it your best.
This month’s exercise is in two parts. First, write a short reflection on the following questions:
Who do you imagine is the ideal reader for the fiction you’re writing?
Who is the day-to-day act of your writing for? Who is served by this use of your time and energy? (It’s more than okay if it’s just you—but claim it, if so!)
I hope you'll be as honest as possible with yourself about these questions, because here, at least, the audience is you, first and foremost. No one need see this reflection but you, unless you choose to share it.
Then, write a complete flash fiction or a single scene for a longer project you’re working on in which you work intentionally and mindfully to prioritize your imagined, intended, ideal audience. If, as Salesses says in Craft in the Real World, "craft is about how the words on the page" engage with the implied reader, what craft choices might you make in service of the ideal reader you imagined?
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in March 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
I'm looking forward to your workshop at the Tucson Festival of Books!