Writer Readers vs. Reader Readers

[Philip Overby]

This has been brought up elsewhere here, but not sure if this has been addressed. I think a lot of the topics we talk about here are "writer problems." Meaning most average readers aren't going to pick up on them. A lot of pretty successful writers don't follow a lot of the rules we harp upon, so I don't see what the big deal is.

Do you find yourself writing for other writers? Or do you want to get more casual readers? I hope I can get both, but recognize if you write too much to impress other writers, you're sort of pigeon-holing yourself and limiting your full potential.

I know a lot of people might answer, "I write for myself" which is good, but you're also a writer...

Can you get both the mainstream audience and the more "writerly" types as well?

 

[Chilari]

That's a fair question; I'm sure I'm not the only one who had become more picky in what I read the more I've learned about writing, or more critical of what I'm reading from a writer's perspective. I know the same has happened as far as history, archaeology and Greek myth is concerned (I'm sure non-Greekists enjoyed Immortals ever so slightly more than my full blown hatred towards it simply out of not realising how badly it bastardised the myths, for example; and my enjoyment of 300 was certainly marred by my having actually read Herodotus's Histories). So greater knowledge and experience of something does affect the way you look at other's attempts at it.

It's certainly true that some of the most popular series - Harry Potter, Eragon and Twilight, for example - have significant issues that writers in particular take issue with. Knowing the craft enables us to find the flaws in others work. But these books sell well, so perhaps we exaggerate the significance of the flaws which most people, the casual readers, don't even notice. Which begs the question - do casual readers care about cliche or italicised thoughts or predictable characters and plots? Or are we in a sort of bubble, like the academic bubble, where we interact almost exclusively with others who have similar experiences and are missing out on the greater variety of experience and thus the different perspectives available? Are we trying too hard to write refined, intelligent stories when casual readers would barely notice the technical skill and are looking instead for fun stories, exaggerated characters and love stories they could insert themselves into?

I don't think we can answer that ourselves - after all, we're all inside the bubble. We need opinions from outside the bubble, from non-writers, from people perfectly happy to read whatever is recommended to them or whatever they happen to pick up in the library.

 

[Cleio]

As an academic, one of the most important things is to know your audience. I have written in the past about the exact same topic for fellow historians with an expertise in the area, for an interdisciplinary group of academics consisting mostly of linguist, and for non-academics, meaning people with simply an interest in the subject. I ended up with very, very different essays. In particular, the level of detail and the emphasis were very different.

I'm trying to take a similar approach in my fiction. While, for example, I am tempted to go into great detail building a realistic world with a viable geography, culture and economy, I also realise that most readers just want a good story. The world should support that story, and certainly not get in the way of it. Too much and too little detail can both be problematic.

 

[JCFarnham]

I do believe we have an academic bubble about us, but conversely I know for a fact that even a casual reader can pick up on something that's bad. My girlfriend knows a lot less about writing than me, and she happily read many of the infamous popular books (yes, even twilight and fifty shades...). The later she enjoyed, and the former... well even she thought the ending was terrible. So surely most people see straight passed the writing itself and read the story.

Hell she even read Eragon and enjoyed it despite recognising how unready Paolini was to be published at first (apparently the writing gets significantly better in the later books. Good for him!).

We really do worry a bit too much. If our readers have an imagination they should cope. Then again if we didn't work on our craft it would be all too obvious.

 

[Philip Overby]

I think there is a market for every kind of writing obviously. I would say Guy Gavriel Kay and Gene Wolfe lean towards more "literary fantasy." I think there's a market for that obviously and they'll win lots of awards: Hugos, Nebulas, etc. Sometimes there is cross-over success with something that is both praised by casual fans and writers alike. This doesn't happen very often though. We have to decide as writers what percentage we want to appeal to. Do we want to write more intelligent fantasy that may win us awards but go unnoticed by casual fans? Or do we want to write "popcorn fantasy" that's easy to consume and may give us more mainstream appeal? Or do we want to blend the two seamlessly and have our cake and eat it too?

I seem to lean towards maybe 70% casual style and 30% literary. I don't want my writing to be inaccessible to most average readers, but I want fans of more literary fantasy to find stuff to enjoy as well.

I'll agree with what others have said and say we have a bubble around us. We may worry with lots of technical problems, but most often than not, readers aren't going to care if you have a prologue or even know what a prologue is. It's your job as a writer for readers to not notice these things anyway. An average person isn't going to criticize a movie's cinematography, but a film student may pick up poor direction, lighting, or thematic problems. Of course, we don't want readers stopping and saying "Boy, I really wish he wouldn't use italics" or "Geez, there sure are a lot of adverbs here." However, I'm sure most readers aren't putting down a book for these reasons. They're putting it down because the story isn't engaging them.

 

[Steerpike]

I think Guy Gavriel Kay straddles the divide as well as anyone. His work is intelligent and literate, and at the same time fun and very accessible. Gene Wolfe probably leans more toward the literary side than the accessible side, though I enjoy his work a great deal. Kay may well be the best fantasy writer living, in my opinion

 

[gavintonks]

This is a good point and I wish to add many really good books are not being read anymore because of the language style they are written in.
The fact is education standards are dropping and the level of literacy is down, and it is the amount of media spend the companies have. I personally do not think a lot of the work I read when I was young like John Wyndham would make it through because of the language style it is written plus the shear volume of material available to read Duncan wood and all the great books from 40 years ago, people want to be anchored in today I think that is much of the allure of Harry Potter.
As to copying a writers style without your own voice today you are considered a clone of someone else, which for many who just wish to be published is great

 

[Amanita]

For me, story and characters are the things that matter when I'm reading or writing something. My goal in writing is to share my stories with as many people as possible, make them understand, care about the themes and the things happening to the character. My "target audience" includes everyone who likes to read fantasy stories. Given my personality this is quite ambitious and I'm not sure if it's a realistic goal but still, that's what I'm going for.

[...]people want to be anchored in today I think that is much of the allure of Harry Potter.

I fully agree with this.
This is why I'm only reading few classical works myself. Usually, they're either about (tragic) love stories between nobles or about nobles killing each other, neither really interests me. (My mother used to claim that the English-speaking world has more interesting stuff, maybe I should take a look there after all. I'm really fond of Nathaneal Hawthorne's "House of the Seven Gables" which is borderline fantasy too.)
I've read these stories for school and I did well enough with them, but wasn't really motivated to do so in my spare time. Well, with the excpetion of one work where the author links the relationships between his characters to chemical reactions and which I'm going to read after my exam.

As far as my fantasy-reading is concerned, I'm definitely finding more flaws now after having discussed them so often, but most of the time, the technical ones aren't bad enough to really bother me. The same's not true for extremely badly executed cliched plotlines and annyoing characters.

 

[SeverinR]

I look at the "rules" as general not unbreakable.
I am pretty sure any "rule" we make or try to follow, some author breaks regularly and gets paid alot in doing so.

The rules are there as a guideline not concrete boundries never to be crossed.

 

[Anders Ämting]

I do believe we have an academic bubble about us, but conversely I know for a fact that even a casual reader can pick up on something that's bad. My girlfriend knows a lot less about writing than me, and she happily read many of the infamous popular books (yes, even twilight and fifty shades...). The later she enjoyed, and the former... well even she thought the ending was terrible. So surely most people see straight passed the writing itself and read the story.

I think that we may focus a lot on issues regular readers won't notice, and we probably think they are more important than they really are. That said, I don't think there is anything wrong with us having high standards as craftsmen.

Sure, the readers may not be able to evaluate your technical skill as an author, but they are not supposed to. They are just supposed to enjoy the story without really contemplating why. But even if they are not analyical about it, most of them can probably tell a well-written story from a poorly written one. Writing quality just isn't necessarily a deal breaker we tend to think it is.

It's kinda like making movies - a modern movie production puts an insane amount of effort into things that the audience is actually not supposed to notice. If they notice, you have done it wrong. But the fact that it is there still makes for a richer experience. For a movie producer, knowing all that stuff is still really important, but it's not why we normal mortal moviegoers buy cinema tickets. We just want a good time.

It's not like people enjoy Twilight because it is poorly written, but rather in spite of it. If Stephanie Meyer was a much better author and wrote the exact same book only with more skill and refinement, the only differance would be that more people would like it.

 

[Penpilot]

Well, for me, I write to communicate the story clearly, and I leave everything else at the door. If there's an audience for it then good. If not, on to the next thing. I believe if my writing is truly up to snuff then I'll get published. If it's not then it won't.

I find that because I'm familiar with all these writing 'rules' sometimes its a barrier to enjoying a good story. It's so easy to spot the flaws, and I tend to focus on them instead of seeing all the good, and sometimes subtle, things that the story does well.

I try to look at both sides now, with varying degrees of success. If I see a 'flaw' in a story, I ask myself why is that there? Was that a conscious choice or just a mistake? What did the author gain by doing something a certain way vs. what they lost? I try not to dismiss something because a 'rule' has been broken without thinking about what the author was trying to achieve. At the same time I try to look for all the good things a story does whether the book as a whole is considered crap or not.

There are reasons why certain books are published and why others aren't, and it goes beyond just the 'rules'. And I think there's wisdom to be gained by trying to figure out what those reasons are.

As for the audience I'm trying to reach, it's anyone who will enjoy my story or at the very least someone who thinks reading it wasn't a waste of time. If I get tremendous praise by the critics and writers, great. If I don't, but there are people who will pay me to write and people who really want to read what I write because it's entraining, better. I don't write to be critically acclaimed. I write to tell an honest story and if good things follow, it's gravy.

 

[Lorna]

I think what this question comes down to is a case of knowing your audience. The problem is how do you know your audience?

As a poet I get to know my audience by going out and doing readings, chatting with other poets and testing my work by submitting to magazines. These provide clues as to who my audience is and how they respond to various poems.

Writing fantasy is a whole different ball game. I know one serious fantasy writer in my local area and that's it. That means the audience is not a set of people you can read to and chat with, but outside a forum like this it's something abstract and hypothetical. This is something I seriously struggle with. How can you know what an audience wants when you haven't met them and shared work with them?

I recently read a book where the development of the tradition of story telling was laid out like this:

Oral / Local
Written / Cosmopolitan
Internet / Global

It seems the more technologised we get, the further we are distanced from our audience. How can we know our readers when we don't communicate with them?

 

[ShortHair]

My own feeling is that we shouldn't worry about audience.

When I started reading, I enjoyed almost everything. Then I developed tastes for some things and avoided other things. Then--and I suspect every writer has had this revelation--I finished a story and said to myself, "I can do better than that."

I know what I like. I write things that I would like to read. There's not much new stuff out there that I like, so if I want to enjoy a story, I've got to write it myself. If other people like my work, it should sell. If they don't, why should I write something I don't like? The odds are very small that I'll become a full-time writer. If a big publisher handed me a million-dollar check to write crap, I'd do it, but that's not going to happen either. Life is too short to try to please other people.

As for rules, you learn them over time, but then you develop your own style. Your audience will like your ideas and your style, or you won't have an audience. Trying to write a best-seller is like fighting a war--everyone's trying to duplicate the last success and avoid the last failure. Either way you're behind the curve.

 

[ThinkerX]

I write for myself, I guess. I certainly would not mind seeing my work in print with a nice sized following, but I don't expect such.

I sent copies of version 1 of 'Labyrinth' to my daughter and an old buddy of mine about six or eight months ago. My daughter printed her version out and reads it sometimes during her breaks at work ('Daddy, I need a dictionary to read this!) Makes me wonder about the quality of todays public education.

My old buddy called me out of the blue a week ago, having read through most of his copy. ('Wow! I like this - except for it being in past tense.') okay...

 

[Zero Angel]

I write to write.

But I do agree that we have to be cognizant of who we are talking to when we receive critiques, questions and comments. That doesn't mean that we should just dismiss writer comments out of hand (although I would dismiss anyone telling me to remove the italics for internal dialogue ), but it means we have to be aware of how to respond to these people.

Not to pick on anyone or name names, but the other day on this forum I made an offhand comment basically being, "I think that people that argue this way are way too obsessed with X". To which the person it was made was like, "Yes I am totally obsessed with X and that is a good thing".

(for the sake of being lazy, I did not look up the actual conversation. The X is a placeholder and the word "obsessed" was not used, but was implied).

After that response I thought, "Oh OK, why am I even arguing my point then..."



So when a writer comes to me and says, "I question doing Y here," I ask myself to evaluate them. I do not use the word, "elitist" in my evaluation, but I am sure that idea is circling my consciousness and coloring my thoughts.

Also, not to bring up a certain sparkly vampire or lightning-bolted wizard, but as a writer, I really don't like the writing. Haven't gotten through sparkle vampire, but I do enjoy the wizard tales.

Let me say that again, I enjoy the stories, dislike the writing. Now, could those stories have been told in such a way that the writing was good too? Sure they could have. But they got the job done. They were effective if not beautiful.

 

[Philip Overby]

I disagree about ignoring a potential audience. We all write because we want people to read it. Again, if you're a hobbyist, then this doesn't apply to you. If you want people to read what you write, you need to have some kind of audience in mind. Sure, you can later find an audience, but I'd assume you write because you were inspired by someone else. Therefore, you were the audience at one point. What made you want to read the books you did? That's something to keep in mind as a writer if you want to be read.

 

[gavintonks]

Working with design and predicting what people wish to buy is basically how big is your marketing budget so if you have a publisher who thinks you will wow the world then you will see how they spin it. It is like Avatar I have never seen a more hack ordinary cloned movie in my life but look at the gross earnings, off the chart. The question is will you sell your soul for the audience?

 

[Butterfly]

Well, we are writers, we are also readers... that means that you, yourself is an audience, so writing for yourself means you are writing at least for one type of audience, doesn't it?

Audiences though are be split into generational groups.

Children's, YA, Adult, male, female, etc. The group you are writing for plus genre, sub genres, cross over and knowing the elements of what you are writing about, e.g horror and how to scare readers, use of archetypes that are expected, and most importantly- content that is suitable to the age group you are targeting, a suitable level language and difficulty for that age group, use of words, length of words, rhythm of words etc.

There are other variables, but that is basically what they mean by writing for your audience.

 

[ShortHair]

This sounds paradoxical, I know, but I seem to be writing fantasy for people who don't like fantasy. I showed the rough draft of my book to people who aren't fans, and they said they would read more. Some basic ideas survived that rough draft (oog, that was almost ten years ago), and what replaced the rest has only improved it, I hope.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I find myself second-guessing just about everything I read now, which is kind of annoying. It's become harder for me to just read something and enjoy it without analyzing how it could have been phrased better. So far that's the only thing I really don't like about being a writer.