remember your audience
the deepdark path or the road of love
Most artists will tell you not to think about your audience.
This is very good advice. If you’re creating something in hopes of appeasing a theoretical audience, you’re always going to be chasing a phantom that not only may be a figment but a figment that may never have existed. We cannot predict what the Next Big Thing will be and so we cannot chase that either.
I have seen, instead, artists chase the current fad or temporary art movement. This is understandable but the obvious problem is that the fad or movement may be over by the time you arrive on scene with your book or movie or podcast.
Culture bubbles and churns and sometimes it pops in a specific direction. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re on the front half of that tidal wave, surfing like a maniac. But if you come too late, you’ll just find a drowned city.
But let’s say you’ve cultivated an audience already. One who has been eagerly gobbling up what you’ve been gargling out. You’d think listening to your audience would be a good thing, especially since you know what they want.
The short clip there from Shut Up and Sit Down is worth considering.
What do we lose when an independent creator, who has brought forth something majestically and earthshatteringly cool, begins to adapt to the feedback they’ve received?
Well, sometimes you lose something.
When an artist has spent years tinkering in the dark, in obscurity, and then one of these weird, unwieldy creations from the black pit of their soul burbles to the surface and froths across your living room, it has the capacity to blow the top of your head clean off.
But the next thing they make—now produced in sunlight, in vast airy public spaces where you’ve been able to observe their every move—may be missing some of that dark primordial magic, having exchanged it for gloss and shine.
Something the Agitator fellas often talk about is the beauty of rough edges, the pleasurable friction of art that has imperfections. To them—and maybe to you, too—that friction is its humanness. The work of people, in all their strangeness, producing something the best that they’re able, and purposefully foregoing the smooth lines and rounded edges.
In some ways, this kind of art can only exist without considering the audience at the eventual other side of the dialogue between artist and audience.
This is all well and good and perfectly understood, but what can be gained from knowing and responding to your audience?
Sometimes, a whole lot!
About a month ago, I wrote about telling stories to my son and the simple beauty of it. It has evolved into kind of a funny process now that I’ve begun serializing a story about a young boy named Carrot who wants to become a pirate.
Every night, I tell him a new story about Carrot’s adventures. Always, I wing it, which is honestly quite a lot of fun. A sampling of stories: making curry, fishing, fighting a sea monster, listening to a story told by another character, etc.
What you realize when telling stories to children is that they want the mundane as well as the epic adventures. My son loves Frog and Toad, which are a sequence of stories about two friends who do normal ass shit together, like rake leaves.
It’s beautiful. He loves it.
When my son was obsessed with superheroes, I’d often tell him stories about Spiderman and Hulk, who were his favorites, and these stories were sometimes about fighting villains, but, more often, they were about just hanging out.
Spiderman going to get ice cream or Hulk eating all the food at a picnic for all the assembled Marvel heroes. This aspect of Hulk eating all the food was so hilarious to him that I told dozens of variations of the exact same scene over the course of six months.
Every time, it got a laugh.
But and so, first I wing it and then I write it down, embellishing and expanding as necessary. Finally, I record it so he can listen to it later.
I’m currently about 20 chapters behind what I’ve told him aloud and off the cuff, because writing is more work than just throwing together a story on the fly—your mileage may vary here—but it’s created an interesting back and forth and internal dialogue to the story as it’s being constructed.
Characters and events that were not in my original telling are now part of the new stories being told because he has the recorded versions of those older stories, now bulked up and solidified. And so the story I’m telling is informed by the rewriting of the story I once told. This also allows for callbacks and a more robust worldbuilding because he has the recordings to familiarize himself with—he listens to them a lot!
And so the story being told is constantly in conversation with the story once told and as we move forward, we also move back, since he’s listening to the older stories and the newer stories essentially at the same time.
It’s great fun for both of us.
I mentioned this to JDO and the Broken River Gang last night and JDO said, quite simply, “that’s because you’re writing a story for someone you love instead of people you hate.”
And, damn. If that didn’t just settle in, plant itself, and become a tree by morning.
Thus and so, I’ve come to realize a new way to have fun writing, and it may be the purest and most fun way to write.
While making art primarily for yourself may produce some weird and wild and wonderful art, creating out of love and for love may be a path to produce something that will last. Not only for you, but for those people you love, the ones you’re doing this for.
Speaking of Agitator, check out the new episode.
Definitely check out their serialized novels happening at their Patreon. Them jumping into serializing novels caused me to finally take the leap and serialize my own novel.
And now for some free books: