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?

The Trap of Doubt, Delay and "Discipline"

Recently, I met with one of my writing feedback groups. Most of the folks in this small group are working on memoir, which is a supremely difficult genre. One woman in particular is writing a very hard tale about a very small but potent part of her life - a year or so of mental health struggles in which she lost most of her support network. It's a poignant story, and she tells it very directly.

Since she has begun, she's written with great momentum, clear about what comes next, able to pile through very tricky scenes with great ease. Then she hit some doubt - a moment of not being sure where the story was going next, or what the point was in writing/sharing it. And then she hit some stress - way too many external and internal stressors coming together at the wrong time. Her actually writing got delayed - put on the back burner - by a few months, due to illness and literal, physical inability to write. It's also inevitable that such an intense story would bring up doubt, eventually.