On writing for an audience

“Writers are often told not to think about their audience, but I think that advice can be difficult to use. The audience then becomes something vague and amorphous. How do you communicate with that? Better let the audience be someone real—a lover, a best friend, a colleague, someone who gets your jokes or just likes how you think.”
-Julia Cameron, The Right to Write

Lately I’ve been immersed in this wonderful book by one of my favorite authors on creativity. Cameron says much of what I know in my heart is true, and so yesterday, when I read her words about writing to an audience, I nodded.

Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve been doing this all along.

When I was a girl, I wrote for my dad, because he had left me, because I needed to prove something, because writing was how a little girl’s broken heart could communicate with a dad she never saw or talked to or kissed goodnight.

Those early stories were filled with little girls from perfect families, a mama and a daddy who loved each other, a family intact, because they were how I could tell him that’s who I wanted to be.

And then later, all those essays and journalism pieces in junior high and high school I wrote for him, too. By then they’d all turned dark and melancholy—because that’s what I needed him to know about me, that my life had turned dark and melancholy.

My dad never read my stuff, as far as I know. But I don’t write for him anymore.

Now I write mostly for my husband.

Every time I sit down to write another chapter of All That Came After, I write for him. Every time I craft a blog, I write for him. Every time I compose a piece like this one, I write for him.

I write to make him laugh. I write to make him cry. I write to make him say, “Wow. That was incredible.”

I write to know. I write to be known.

Cameron says that if we write specifically to the “someone” we choose, it will “make your writing targeted and focused. It will also bring to your writing a purity of intent.”

I write for my husband because he is creative and wise and interesting, and writing for him makes my writing pure and focused and true.

And sometimes there are other people who sit in my audience. Sometimes it’s my son, any one of them. Sometimes it’s my mom. Sometimes it’s a friend down the street.

But I never create for the masses.

When we produce art for the masses, we produce watered-down art. We produce only a small piece of who we are and what we carry inside. We produce art that is but a shadow of what we might create for an audience of one.

Because when we are working to please the masses, all those different people with all those different personalities and likes and dislikes and expectations, we will find ourselves chained, inhibited, unsure. What word is the right one? What color would “they” like best? What tune will stick in “their” heads the most?

We could never please everyone in the masses. And when we are trying to please our mass audience, we will not create anything close to the magnificent we could.

Creating for one means we can be specific and true to ourselves.

And if we do it for the one, if we make our art specific, we find that it becomes broad. It speaks to the masses. It touches multiple lives. This is the great paradox of creativity.

“Writing specifically, writing detail by detail, we encounter not only ourselves, not only our truth, but the greater truth that stands behind all art and all communication,” Cameron says. “We touch the spiritual fact that as divided as we may feel ourselves to be, we are nonetheless one.”

Art always begins with one.

Who is your one(s)? How has that changed over the years? What are your thoughts about producing for one or producing for the masses?