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| Audience as Focusing Force |
Different kinds of writing imply different distances from an audience. At the near extreme is audience-oriented writing. You are writing to a particular audience and the whole point is to produce a particular effect. Unless the words have that effect you won't get the money or the contract or the job, you won't get into college, no one will come to your meeting. This is get-the-results writing.
I prepared my lecture carefully. I arrive and start in and suddenly realize I have the wrong approach. I thought carefully last night about what I was going to say and worked out a focus, but now that I see my audience I realize it's the wrong focus for them. The presence of the real audience gives a new orientation to the material in my head. A teacher is asked a hard question in class. He thinks for a few seconds and then turns around and walks to the corner of the room, hunches over a bit, closes his eyes and scrunches up his face and thinks silently for a full minute -- perhaps two. Then he comes back and cheerfully tells what he has figured out. In this section I propose a slightly different image of the audience in order to emphasize a different way in which other people affect our writing. Instead of concentrating on other people as safe or dangerous-as creatures who either cheer us on or suck lemons as we try to play our trumpet -- I will concentrate on audience as a kind of magnetic field which exerts an organizing or focusing force on our words. As we come closer to an audience, its field of force tends to pull our words into shapes or configurations determined by its needs or point of view. As we move farther away from the audience, our words are freer to rearrange themselves, to bubble and change and develop, to follow their own whims, without any interference from the needs or orientation of the audience. Even if an audience is safe, it still exerts this focusing force. At the opposite extreme is get-it-right writing. You don't care whether readers like it or not. The only result that counts is the satisfaction that comes from getting it the way you want it. Perhaps you are writing a poem or story and you have decided you are the only judge that counts. Or you are writing to work out the truth about something important to you and you are trying to serve truth, not readers. Maybe the writing will in fact go to readers; maybe they'll like it; that's nice. But if they don't, that's their problem, not yours. (Of course you may use readers for get-it-right writing. Their reactions can help you enormously -- but for getting it the way you want it, not the way they want it.) Audience-oriented or get-the-results writing is pragmatic and it's usually only a part of some larger transaction with people. Memos, letters, reports, applications are typical examples. The writing is a means to an end. After you have gotten the results you can often happily throw the writing away. Get-it-right writing, on the other hand, is usually writing as an end in itself. No matter what nice things result from having written it, you won't want to throw it away. Because pragmatic writing is part of a larger action-in-theworld, it often involves deadlines and so you are often writing in a hurry. Get-it-right writing, on the other hand, since audience doesn't count so much, is often more leisurely. If you know at the start that this is a very audience-oriented piece of writing, such as a memo or letter of application, try concentrating on your audience and your purpose right at the very beginning. As you start to write, or even before, picture your audience in your mind's eye and figure out just how you really want to affect them -- and then write very much to them. If this strategy works, it will save you much time and effort. The presence of the audience in your head will give your words more focus, will help you thread your way among the many things you could say to what you should say. You won't have to waste your time with inappropriate approaches you will later discard. You won't have to try to write everything you know. The problem of how to reach, this particular audience may even help you figure out something important you've never understood before. When you establish in your head a good relationship with your audience, suddenly your writing runs strong and clear. You can find words and they are right. You are looking readers in the eye and directing your words right to the center of their brains, not staring at their shoes or mumbling distractedly as you stare at the ceiling. When this works, everything clicks. If, for example, you are writing to the school board to protest a certain policy, you will avoid some of the commonest writing problems if you keep those readers vividly in mind. You will be less likely to get off onto a tangent about how smart and delightful your child is, or how terrible you feel because of the way you've been treated, or what bastards they are, or what the seven most important educational principles are that you learned in a certain book. Seeing school-board members in your mind's eye will help you keep to the main point, figure out your best argument, and help you realize when you are likely to bore them or anger them or make them condescend to you. Sometimes you can't even figure out what you need to tell people till you see them. That's what happened to me when I worked out my lecture alone and then tried to give it to the real audience and realized I had the wrong approach. I hadn't done enough to make contact with my audience in my mind the night before. But of course sometimes this strategy doesn't work. Keeping the audience in mind may hinder your efforts to write. Instead of your language running strong and clear, it gums up or goes dead. Perhaps you know those members of the board and three of them intimidate you. Keeping them in mind makes you nervous, stilted, unable to think straight -- just as you would be if you were standing there in front of them in the official meeting room with polished tables. Or perhaps you don't know them at all and that blocks you: sitting down and writing to these official names-without-faces suddenly brings back all the anxiety you have ever felt about mysterious authority figures. But it's not just danger that can make an audience hinder you. What concerns me in this chapter is the focusing or organizing force they exert. Perhaps, for example, you are writing a background research paper for a friend who is running for political office. You are not at all intimidated by her but she sees everything polarized in terms of republican-or-democrat. Every time you try to write to her, you get sucked into that polarization -- either giving in to it or spending all your energy just fighting it. Keeping your audience in mind prevents you from working out the truth and saying clearly what you need to say. You finally realize that you need to ignore her, get yourself out of her magnetic field, do lots of fast first-draft writing to help your thinking cook on its own. When you finally work out clearly what you have to say, then it is safer -- indeed necessary -- to move back into the field of force of your audience so it will help you shape your material to her concern with party division. Or perhaps you are writing a story for a particular magazine, say a children's magazine. Again, you are not threatened, you have written others before. But every time you start to write to your child audience your writing slips into certain overworked or corny patterns. You feel the pull of certain audience expectations -- or of certain habits or expectations you have with this audience -sucking you down paths you sense you should avoid. You finally realize you have to move out of the field of force exerted by that audience, write the story as it wants to be written -- let it grow in the directions it is trying to grow in -- no matter how inappropriate the result may be for this audience. When it is finished you can make some changes in it -- perhaps even very radical changes. You can change inappropriate language, leave out whole episodes, entire characters, change the plot. That may sound like radical mutilation, but it can lead to a deeper "rightness" -- verbal and textural integrity -- than you can usually achieve by constantly fiddling and adjusting and adapting your story to your audience as you are trying to write it for the first time. And what you usually discover is how little you need to change to fit it to the audience, even though you were ignoring its needs as you wrote. (See Auden poem "The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning" for a wry treatment of this point.) Again a paradox. When you attend to audience from the start and let your words grow out of your relationship with it, sometimes you come up with just what you need, and in addition your words have a wonderful integrity or fit with that audience. Everything is on target. But sometimes the effect is opposite. The audience hinders your writing by exerting too much pull on you (or intimi dating you). And occasionally when you think too much about audience, your words are too heavy with audience-awareness. Your words feel too much like those of a salesman who is trying too hard to make "audience contact." But it's not really so much a paradox as an occasion for exercising choice and staying in charge of your own writing process. That is, you can choose when, during the writing process, to enter into the magnetic field exerted by the audience. If your piece is audienceoriented and if you are in a hurry, you should try entering into it at the beginning and staying in it. You may be lucky and not have to do much revising. But if that keeps you from being as inventive or creative as you need to be, then stay out of reach of your audience and approach it later, during revising. Your choice about when to enter the audience's field of force will also be affected by your own temperament. Some people are better at writing from within the circle of audience, others are better at writing from outside it. Some people, that is, are good at audience contact, at talking while they look their listener in the eye. They find it natural to speak and write in ways that fit particular audiences. They are good at feeling the listener's point of view and speaking appropriately. They are good at letting the audience sit inside their head and have a say in how the words come out. I lack this skill. I'm bad at thinking while I look my audience in the eye. Sometimes I can't even figure out what I'm feeling till I look away or close my eyes. (I am not, however, the teacher I pictured at the start of the chapter who goes into the corner to think. I'd probably teach better if I dared do that.) It makes me mad that some people should be so good at something I find so difficult. It has taken me a long time to realize that even though such audience-oriented writers have an enormous advantage over the rest of us, they are simply displaying one kind of verbal intelligence, and the rest of us have another kind. It sounds odd to say but we are good at excluding the audience from a place in our heads as we write. We non-audience-oriented temperaments are better at speculating, musing, flying high, or diving deep -- letting words and thoughts lead us where they are going despite the pull of audience. When I can stop being jealous of the audienceoriented writers long enough, I can also be smug: those folks got good grades in writing all the time and can get their memos and reports written more quickly and fluently than I can, but they aren't so good at freeing themselves from audience needs and expectations and coming up with what is original and authentic. Thus audience-oriented verbal intelligence is in a way more practical and realistic than the other kind, but it is important to realize that neither is superior. They simply represent two different linguistic muscles, two strategies for putting out words, two distances at which to sit from an audience as you think. If you have the first sort of temperament, you are probably better at getting things written quickly, clearly, and in a way that fits the audience. You have an enormous advantage for the kinds of writing required in school or business and the practical world. If you have the other kind of verbal intelligence you are probably better at getting-itright writing: letting your own piece develop according to its own internal potentialities (and in your own interests) and not caring so much about the needs of audience. Because the audience-oriented temperament is so much better for the quick execution of pragmatic writing tasks, many people with the other temperament simply conclude that they are congenitally bad at writing. And they are often branded as dumb or illiterate in school. They give up and don't learn to use their brand of verbal intelligence (which mostly means learning to revise enough to harness what they have figured out for an audience). They end up never writing. But still, some of the great works of speculative thought and imaginative literature are deficient in audience contact: the writers didn't give a damn about audience. They produced works that are difficult and obscure -- organized in the worst possible way for someone who doesn't already understand the ideas or partly share the vision. Conversely, some writing that is especially clear to readers is, as it were, too clear. It succeeds too well in merely following the beaten paths that already exist in readers' heads. It lacks originality or authenticity in thought or language. Once you realize that we are dealing here not with a matter of good and bad writers but rather with two complementary habits of relating to an audience, you can learn to exploit your strong side instead of just feeling bad about your weak side. The important thing is that you get to decide how far away from your audience to sit while you do most of your writing. If you are more like me you will find it better to ignore audience as you write and then during revising make a special effort to orient what you have to say to the audience. If you have the opposite temperament and skill, you may find you get things written best if you keep mental contact with your audience as you write. Indeed you may even want to use some of your revising efforts for trying to break out of audience orientation, instead of trying further to adapt your material to their needs.But in addition to using your strength for tasks at hand you can gradually work on your weak side. I need to practice writing while I look my audience in the eye. It will help me be quicker in writing pragmatic audience-oriented pieces. Audience-oriented writers need to practice detaching themselves from the pull of audience and encouraging a drift of focus, an evolution of organization, bubbling.The only thing to watch out for -- especially if you have a nonaudience-oriented temperament -- is the feeling that says, "I'm a writer not a mere communicator. I don't care about pragmatic success with readers, I care about quality." The truth is that even if you are writing something that won't ever go to an audience, you often can't get it the way you want it till you spend some of your writing or revising time thinking of this piece in terms of a particular audience and situation. For I overstated earlier the advantages of staying away from an audience if you want creativity and cooking. Audience is not the only influence on your words that may prevent them from evolving into new and different orientations. This same kind of inhibition can come from yourself. Often you cannot get an essay out of its rut or find that central image your poem needs till you go up and sit almost in the lap of a powerful imaginary audience and do some more writing. Sometimes you need to overpower your own field of force in order to shake things up and produce new growth, and you can best do this by visualizing your audience so they are vividly present to you as you write, and directing your words to them. (It can help to work with a sharing group.) Summary and Advice
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