Your Audience, Your Art
Never forget that your audience is part of your art. If you doubt this to be true, take a look at A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a wildly famous 19th-century painting by Georges Seurat. If you look closely at the painting, you’ll notice something strange: there are no brushstrokes. It’s a pointillist piece, or a painting where the artist only uses the tip of their brush to repeatedly stipple the canvas until they’re satisfied with the end product. That sort of technique seems so arduous that it calls to question why an artist would go to the trouble to do it for hours on end.
The answer, according to art world cognoscenti, is that he believed that such a meticulous approach—alternating, for example, between innumerable red and blue dots—would not only create a unique visual effect for viewers regarding the piece at a distance in a museum gallery but also create an irreplicable shade—of purple, in this case—that he would never be able to produce by merely mixing the colors together on an easel.
What does this have to do with your writing? The literature that you can’t tear yourself away from doesn’t end up that way by happenstance. Writers that craft compelling works all do one thing that sets their polished prose apart from bland blog posts like this one: they consider the experience of the reader. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, everything that we write is an amalgam of choices that, in gestalt, impact how the text reads. Word choice is an obvious example of this, but structure, tone, narrative voice, and even the physical construction of a page—where we insert page breaks and the length of our paragraphs—impact how the stuff we write comes off to readers.
What do we do with that information? We take a step back from our writing. We’re all prone to the endowment effect—the notion that something we’ve created holds greater value to us than the same product produced by someone else. Being in love with your writing isn’t a crime, but being so wed to something you’ve produced that you don’t stop to consider how others might receive it is criminally inconsiderate.
How can we know what needs to be done? It’s not just about being honest with ourselves when we review our work, there’s a lot to be gained from reading as well. We tend to rate what we consume at extremes: either we loved it or hated it. In such cases, it’s pretty easy to pinpoint what worked as well as what went wrong. The stuff that falls in the middle is trickier because mediocre is unremarkable. That’s where most of us fall on the writing spectrum, especially when we’re just getting going. And that’s not a bad thing, but it should push us to rip lukewarm lit apart and figure out what might make it more compelling. By taking note of what a writer is up to when they pull off something spectacular, and pinpointing places where pieces fall flat, we give ourselves crib notes that we can reference when our own work isn’t quite where we want it.
So, whether you find yourself gushing over something you couldn’t put down, casting a book off to the island of misfit toys that is the “did not finish” pile, or somewhere in between, make sure you’re paying attention. Challenge yourself to move past ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ and toward considered reflections about what the author is doing and how it impacts the way you interact with the book. It will help you learn to write with the reader in mind, making your audience part of your art.