Audience Versus Critic

"So, I've been thinking lately," a client who is starting her first novel said to me during an appointment the other day. "I need to start thinking about my audience - who they are, what they want to hear, what voice works."

I had just finished Jen Louden's newsletter on realizing her memoir doesn't work, after working on it for 100,000+ words. I understand - you can't just write the whole thing without thinking about audience. But thinking about audience too soon can really cut you off from the actual voice that is still finding its way out.

"Sounds good," I replied. "Any ideas?"

She went on to express that her mind had started offering feedback from a potential audience.
"Oh? What kind of feedback?" I asked.
"No one is going to want to read about this character if she x, y, or z's," she replied.
"Oh honey," I said to the client, "That is NOT thinking about your audience. THAT is your inner critic."

So how do we know the difference?


I love Tara Mohr's descriptions of the voice of the inner critic, which I have referred to again and again (but here is the original post where I link to her pithy posts about the topic). One of the things she says is the inner critic repeats itself, says the same things over and over again (just like external critics, sigh). It comes up with variations, yes, depending on what topic you are criticizing yourself over. But it states things very repetitively. It also states things in absolutes: "You never do x, you never do y," or even, "No one is going to want to read about this character."

An audience is specific. An audience is a voice, someone you know, or persons you know, and their actual responses. When you aren't sure if your self feedback is inner critic or internalizing audience, get some audience. Audience you trust. Tell them EXACTLY what you need for feedback. If you need your ego petted and calmed, then ask for that. If you need to hear what is not working, ask for that but ask them to be specific. And if they just reply by saying, "It's great, I couldn't find anything wrong with it," find someone who is willing to get nitty and gritty, without insulting your very being.

Honestly, until we have interacted with actual audiences, it is pretty much impossible to know what an audience would think about our work. It can be quite surprising. A few years ago, I gave a talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival about having a transgender spouse, tied to the book Trans-Kin I had an essay in. It was an early writing, one I didn't get enough friendly audience feedback on, and a woman approached me after the talk and QnA to gently tell me I used the word "crazy" a bit too many times.

She explained, as a high school teacher, how she had witnessed one of her students with severe mental health challenges, who was excited to hear me speak, flinch and sink lower every time they heard me use that word. I felt a deep burn of shame, and an instant knowing that if I had edited it more closely - with others, not just by myself - they would have caught my overuse of the word. It was potent once, but in a few pages I used it six times. I apologized appropriately and took this real-life audience lesson seriously.

If you want to write just for your self, that is fine. No pressure to publish. But if you hope to have actual audiences one day, you need to work on test audiences first, otherwise, when you bow at the end of a talk and the people come to tell you how they received your work, you might be in for nasty surprises. Inevitably, you will get trolls (the internet version of bullies), and they will mimic your inner critic. And inevitably, you will not meet someone's needs. But the more you expose your work to good audiences - external ones - first, the more resilient the work will be for public consumption.

Side effect - even if you are just writing for yourself, audiences - gentle ones - help keep your inner critic in check. And your inner critic - if you are writing for others - also gets counter balanced by real, useful, concrete feedback. So it is a win-win situation, sharing with others, so long as you have the right environment.