Who Are You Writing For?

I came across a fantastic quote a few years ago - 'Write first for yourself and then for the rest of the world'. Another way to put this is 'Write first with the door open and then with the door closed'.

For me this means that for the first draft of the story, or the book, you should allow yourself to be free creatively - to flow with the story and write the story you want to see, with the characters that you want to write about. Here you don't have to worry so much about passives, or if the descriptions are all that crash hot, as long as you are experiencing the story. This gives you a narrative drive and a kind of freshness, even if it is raw.

Then, when you open the door up, you are opening it up to critique and feedback from your critique group, editor etc. Here you start to think about what a cold reader really takes away from that prose. The descriptions need to be crafted until they are good enough to evoke that same feeling that you experienced inside the reader. The passives, which were good enough to give you the inside feel of the action, have to be replaced with more direct storytelling - this is the old Show Don't Tell chestnut.

But beyond this, when you are just sitting there alone, either working on the first draft or beavering away on the nth draft of the Great Novel, do you have a sense that you are writing for someone? Is your sweat and toil being directed at a particular reader? Or is it a pure artistic sort of fugue, where you are communicating with some abstract part of the Universe?

Many writers are very deliberate about constructing their stories. They think about the target audience, even the the main gender they want to appeal to. They might study the stats describing the book-buying public with meticulous care and try and be crafty about what they scribe. Mmmn . . . that's definitely not me. But maybe these strategic writers actually have a sort of person in mind throughout the process of their work. I'm not sure.

Who are you writing for?