Audience from a Writer’s Perspective

Nov 10

Nov 10 Audience from a Writer’s Perspective

By Victoria Fortune

Who is your audience? This sounds like a marketing question, but it’s one every writer has to consider. And like most elements of writing, it is far more complex than it seems at first glance. In school, audience is often taught in the context of nonfiction. Students (hopefully) learn to adjust their focus, level of detail, diction, syntax, etc. according to their target audience. However, questions of audience can be even more complicated for fiction writers.

Walter J. Ong, the former president of the Modern Language Association and a professor of literature who explored how written language changed human consciousness, argued in his essay, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” that it is inaccurate to refer to readers as an audience. An audience, he insisted, must be physically present, hearing and reacting to a speaker in real time. Their reaction informs the speaker’s performance. Likewise, the audience is able to gather a great deal of information from the speaker’s expressions, mannerisms and other nonverbal cues that inform the intent of the speech.

A reader has no such cues to go by. And writers have no control over the delivery of their words or the context in which readers receive them. A writer’s challenge is to figure out which details to provide readers, so they can fill in these missing cues and flesh out the scene. It is the participation of the reader in this process that makes reading a distinctly different and much more active task than listening or watching.

Ong points out that, for a speaker, the presence of an audience provides a ready-made context for the speech, providing its purpose and focus. But this is not so for fiction writers. There is no audience present, and thus no apparent reason for telling the story. The fiction writer must create one.

When writing in the third person, the narrator’s voice is hard to distinguish from the author. The narrator becomes almost invisible, and the reader is less likely to question the narrator’s motive for telling the story. After all, that’s what authors do, right? In first-person narration, however, when a character with a stake in the events is telling the story, it begs the question why? What is her agenda? Is he trustworthy? And to whom is the narrator telling the story?

In fact, fiction writers have more than one audience to consider: the actual audience who will read the book, as well as the audience the narrator is addressing. They are not necessarily one and the same. Many first-person fiction writers resolve this issue by employing a writer-narrator, who functions much like a third-person narrator. Fitzgerald set the standard with Nick in The Great Gatsby. The story isn’t about Nick. Like a third-person narrator, he almost fades into the background as he tells Gatsby’s story, which, as a writer, he deems a story worth telling.

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s narrator is an imaginary writer who interviews the imaginary main character, Pi, and then tells Pi’s story in first person, from Pi’s POV. This effectively addresses why the narrator is telling the story: he’s been told this story so amazing it “might even make you believe in God.” By telling readers it’s true, he primes them to accept the fantastical events in this story about the nature of faith. If Martel had just told the story directly from Pi’s point of view, readers would be more likely to question whether the narrator was unreliable or insane.

Creating a more specific audience for a first-person narrator provides a context, orienting readers to the characters and events. For example, in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator, attempting to prove he is not mad, tells in excruciating detail how he killed the old man he worked for. Who is he trying to convince? Poe puts readers in this role, giving them a stake in the story.

How do you think about audience when you write?

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