Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Audience?
Or, Overthinking In Place of Writing
From one creative person to another, I don’t have to say much for you to understand that putting our work “out there” for judgment in the Court of Public Opinion is about as frightening as having a doctor cup your manhood in his palm during the annual physical.
Especially coming from someone who’s still making their bones in the writing community with little to no readership, the position of putting my writing out there for other people to read and critique can really get under my skin sometimes.
It makes me ask all the hard, unproductive questions about my work before I even set it down on the page. Do I sound articulate? Will people understand my message? Will anyone think it’s interesting or worth hearing?
Whether you’re writing for Random House, BuzzFeed, or your old Blogger page from 2006, the thought of an audience reading the words you so painstakingly constructed can stop a writer dead in their tracks, paralyzed with fear. Especially in today’s age, where readers have the chance to directly interact with writers in the comments section of their articles or writings (this very site being a pretty good example of such a dynamic) and therefore have the chance of facing an insurmountable deal of criticism.
I get it. Being judged is never fun; being judged harshly even more so.
But why should we worry about something that hasn’t even happened yet? Or may not even happen at all?
Trying to guess and obsess over what the future will hold when it comes to this is fruitless and highly unproductive. You should never allow the fear or rejection or the fear of “never being read” hold you back from telling the story you want to tell.
Because at the end of the day, that’s not entirely why you should be writing at all.
You should write because you love to; because you can’t stop yourself from pouring words onto the page.
As you practice and hone your craft and develop your authorial voice, you more often than not will develop a readership. It may not be in the hundreds or thousands like you think all “rock-star writers” have, but everyone has to start somewhere.
If literary legends like Hemingway and King still though early versions of their work were absolute dog shit and worried about whether anyone would read them, then you’re in pretty damn good company. I mean, King about gave up on Carrie and chucked it in the trash can. Hemingway admitted to his buddy Scott Fitzgerald that he only found a nugget of gold within the “ninety one pages of shit” he managed to write every day.
Did they let any of that stop them?
It shouldn’t stop you, either.
It’ll still be hard. We look to an audience as our survival, our bread and butter. I mean, they are the ones that buy copies of our books or generate revenue from clicking on our links. An audience can and does help us pay our bills from day to day. So of course it’s important to put out something that people will be attracted to read and will keep them reading.
But the obsession to “please the audience” should not be the impetus nor the sole reason as to why we choose writing in the first place. Story is king; story is paramount. Say what you want to say, and the audience will follow.
