April 4, 2022
Adapting to Your Audience In Writing: a Bad Idea
“Adapt to your audience” is a sentence I’ve seen used by many so-called writing advisors. It’s a bad idea to begin with, for any artistic context. But adapting to your audience in writing is a truly awful idea, for reasons we’ll examine.
Let’s get some definitions out of the way first: What do we mean by “adapting to your audience”? This basically means to take readers’ feedback into consideration and alter the work accordingly.
For advance readers (that is, beta readers) this means modifying your novel to suit the (extrapolated) audience’s desires, even before publishing. Otherwise, it means taking feedback and reviews into consideration and “give people what they want” in the future.
Either option is awful. Let’s see why.
Audience versus Intended Audience
Having an intended audience is something every writer knows. Indeed, whether you’re aware of it or not, you do have an intended audience. Perhaps it’s something you only subconsciously realize; perhaps you’re one of those authors who say “I only write for myself”. Still, you have an intended audience (in this case, yourself).
In reality, even if it’s only subconscious, our intended audience expands beyond our own self. At the very least, it assumes people like us – which is a very powerful motivator, for sociocultural reasons I’ll let you ponder on.
As a result, we do adapt to our intended audience, even subconsciously. We write because of our intended audience. But adapting to your (abstract, symbolic) intended audience is one thing, adapting to your audience when they’re actual people is another.
Adapting to Your Audience Means Pleasing Your Audience
… and good luck with that. Let’s recall my recent post on mediocrity and constant app updates. I there say:
Users often want constant updates just for the sake of updating, without necessarily having any specific plan in mind. Developers, to please their audience, offer such updates without necessarily having a clear picture of what will occur down the road.
Writing is no different; it only happens on a slower, less easily perceived scale. But the dynamics are the same. Let’s see an example.
How Adapting to Your Audience Leads to Things Falling Apart
… and no, I don’t refer to Chinua Achebe’s magnum opus – if anything, Chinua Achebe is a great counter-example of writing without planning to please your audience; I’ll let you figure out why.
The process of adapting to your audience often goes like this:
- Book A is published.
- Author receives feedback, containing all sorts of “shortcomings”.
- Many of these are contradictory, yet the author is troubled.
- Author writes book B trying to address these “issues”.
- Trying to please as many as possible, makes book B not having any sharp edges. It lacks personality.
A simplistic depiction, to be sure, but you get the idea. If beta readers are involved, the process is the same, with the only difference being that step 1 is virtual/implied and step 3 might be narrower in scope (depending on the quantity – and quality! – of beta readers).
In any case, the fact remains: Adapting to your audience means pleasing your audience. And because you want to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody.
Are You a Writer or an Artist?
Yes, that was the question I asked you at some earlier point, in an earlier post. The two aspects are mutually exclusive. You can’t be both a writer and an artist – in the sense that you can’t fully serve your artistic vision while wanting to sell books. Of course, the overwhelming majority of us try to balance in the middle.
Still, the question – or rather, your answer – will inform your decisions. Do you care more about creating a work of art you consider successful? Or do you “just want to sell a lot of books”?
Taken to the extremes, art is incompatible with selling books because art – quite by definition – is about disruption. Art is a process involving the shattering of what’s old and safe, its goal – to the extent art has any – is to instigate changes. Conversely, selling books (or anything) is about not rocking the boat, and offering the known and safe.
Art is inherently radical; selling is inherently conservative.
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Some things are easier for me because I can’t. I don’t mean small points of confusion from my beta reader (darn it, she’s usually right). Those get corrected.
I received a couple of low star reviews. We will leave them simply at: those readers accepted a giveaway book (when I tried that – I don’t any more) that was described properly, and ignored the description. I love having those reviews there.
I am incapable of deviating from the bones of the story that came as a single vouchsafed whole – I only have to finish writing it, at my frustratingly slow pace. It picked a disabled writer – and isn’t something I can ever hand off. It will take at least five more years after this one to write the third volume; I’m hoping to survive the process. If people want a different story, they’re going to have to tell it themselves.
Power AND responsibility. As usual.
Your reference to proceeding at a slow pace reminded me of something I’ve always wanted to ask you: Do you ever feel that, in the course of this slow process, you’ve changed your mind on aspects of the story as a result of life experiences you meanwhile acquired?
My own pace (as a result of my style, my kind of stories, and my whole M.O) is so fast that I don’t have time to be troubled by such predicaments, but I’ve always wondered how it works. I mean, starting a story and then, “200 pages later” being equivalent to many years’ worth of life experiences, must change your perspective on the story, does it not?
I started this story in 2000. I don’t think I’ve changed anything – but I HAVE learned to write. The very first and only complete draft was to see if I could step through the story credibly from beginning to end. After that, I poured what energy I had into craft, and plotting, and finally started on a one-scene-at-a-time final draft. When I got to the end of Chapter 20, out went Purgatory. I’m almost at the end of Chapter 40 – and Netherworld goes live this year. Then straight through to 60, which includes the epilogue. The third volume will be some version of Limbo/Paradise.
When you’re disabled with zero energy experience doesn’t come into it much – just survival. But I don’t cringe when I read it any more.
I actually have to be careful not to change so much that it won’t be of a piece – the reader shouldn’t be able to tell. It helps that I don’t get out much, and lately can’t stand reading the NYT or the Washington Post much.
I’m getting slower, but have less to learn, so I’m faster.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I might write a post about such issues at some point.
I’m a very odd writer – but you do what you have to do, and my brain has a limited capacity. Fractal is what works. I can hold any level in my head long enough to work with it, from the entire trilogy to a single beat, this way.
What I add is the absolute trust that the levels all work together for the same story – because so far everything has.
I know no one else who does this, but mention it because it’s one more way to write, and it works for me.
A writer should never forget that a text is written in the absence of the reader, and it is read in the absence of the writer. Or look at historical linguistics: we derive sense from nonsensical texts thousands of years old.
The “thousands of years old” part made me wonder, what would future humans (or whatever beings, if any left on the planet) would think of our literature!