Who Are You Writing For?
Ideally, the stories you write will spring from a place of deep personal interest and engagement. This matters whether you’re writing flash fiction or a novel, but it’s particularly important if you’re writing long-form fiction because you’re going to be spending a lot of time—possibly years—in the world of that work. That kind of endurance is fueled by special interest. What makes that interest “special” differs each time you begin a story, but it must be there. For this reason, you might say that you’re writing for yourself.
However, a focus on self comes with a few potential problems. If you allow your special interest to become the primary motivator for writing the work—that is, you’re writing mainly to entertain yourself, to push a message, to show off your literary chops—the writing will be self-indulgent. This is not a good thing if you want other people to read it. You risk losing your audience by prioritizing your interests over theirs.
What does self-indulgent writing look like? It’s characterized by flaws like:
Overly ornate or “purple” language
A self-conscious sense of its own cleverness—verbal grandstanding
A lack of transitional elements or a failure to make necessary connections for the reader
A predilection for opacity masquerading as poetic language
A lack of judicious pruning
Blatant sermonizing or propagandizing
Now, please keep in mind that many of these issues are hallmarks of the rough draft. When you’re writing the first draft, you should feel free to pour your words onto the page in whatever convoluted, confusing, self-indulgent way they appear. As Terry Pratchett aptly put it, the first draft is “just you telling yourself the story,” so indulge yourself in that generative draft.
This is why revision is so critical. If writing the first draft is when you tell yourself the story, then revision is where you tell it to the reader. With revision, the focus shifts away from your own interests to the audience’s. Ideally, you’re writing for an audience that shares the same special interest. If so, your passion will resonate with your readers, and it will sustain them as they travel over hundreds and thousands of words with you.
How to accomplish this shift in focus? Try to read from the audience’s perspective. The reader cares about the story, not about your cleverness, per se. You can and should be clever, but it should always be in service of the story, not a distraction from it. Use your wittiness and prodigious vocabulary to season the dish, not substitute for the meat of it.
We’ve all heard the advice to “kill your darlings,” but what does that mean? It means to edit your beloved writing with the ruthless red pencil of a stranger. Restrain the impulse to showboat! It’s a glaring distraction to readers; it gets in the way of the story you’re trying to tell.
Those beautiful turns of phrase that show how literary your voice is but contribute absolutely nothing to the story? Kill them. Inside jokes? Kill them. Prune out anything that is overly flowery or precious or clever. If your story can’t stand without them, that’s a good indicator that you need to do some developmental work.
Another way to serve the readers’ interests is to make sure you’ve given them all they need to understand what’s going on. Sometimes, when we’re in the “zone,” and the writing is pedal to the medal from the first paragraph, we forget that the reader doesn’t have access to the story that lives in our head—only the words we put down on the page. Write fast, revise slow. Read your work word by word to ensure you’ve given readers what they need to know who the characters are, to make necessary connections between plot elements, to find their way in the narrative without having to bushwack through inside jokes and opaque, overly poetic metaphors. Do the work of world-building. Make sure each character serves a purpose alone and alongside the other characters. (Meaningless cameos and walk-on characters? Kill them.)
When readers pick up your work, especially a piece of long-form fiction, they are essentially trusting you to deliver on their expectations. This unwritten contract between author and reader is fragile and should be taken seriously. If you hook your reader with a great opening but your story goes off the rails (loses the plot, is filled with errors and inconsistencies, is afflicted with any of the self-indulgent qualities mentioned above), you break that contract, and the reader closes the book.
Consider writing as an act of service where you get to use your gift to benefit your readers. Prioritizing someone else’s experience with your work isn’t easy; it takes a huge amount of extra effort and care. You’re working hard so that someone else can have a good time. Use the elements that light you up to give your readers an excellent experience--a sound return on the investment of their time and money.
