The audience is the most important part to any form of art. It doesn’t matter what medium or what avenue your creating in, whether it’s writing, film, art, dance, song or music, if you don’t take your audience into consideration, than you’ve missed your purpose. In order to create something that is going to be publicized and put out into the world you need to figure out who it’s for. It can’t just be written any way you want and then sloppily thrown out into the public domain. It has to be crafted carefully and thoughtfully so that it reaches and registers with the correct people.
In Ann Handley’s book titled “Everybody Writes”, she talks about the need to understand and empathize with your audience so they can have the most pleasurable time reading your written work, but I believe it applies to all forms of creation.
“Good writing (and therefore crafting good experiences) requires us to understand and have empathy for our audience, their situation, their needs and goals,” said Jonathon Colman of Facebook” (Handley 47).
Now when I say you must know your audience I’m not saying you must create a specific age range or gender that should best view your work, but in the back of any creators mind they should know who they are making something for in order to keep their work grounded. It could be your sister, your dad or yourself but there needs to be someone or some group that you believe will relate to it the most.
In William Zinsser’s book titled “On Writing Well”, Zinsser disagrees with most other author’s but I agree with him in the fact that you yourself can be your own audience.
“Who am I writing for? It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience – every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in the mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it” (Zinsser 24).
While many people disagree with his opinion, I believe in it and not only for written work like books or reports, but for films, music and art too. People are able to express their own emotions and opinions in their work and it doesn’t always need to have another person in mind.
For example, I am a film major and my favorite thing to do in my down time is to watch movies, and the last two news films I watched that were also both nominated for Best Motion Picture at the Oscars this year were 1917 and Marriage Story, but also both of those films were created by their directors as passion projects for themselves. 1917 was a love note from Sam Mendes the director to his grandfather who used to tell him all these war stories. While Mendes was making this film he wasn’t thinking about what demographic would go to the theater to watch this film he was just making to commemorate his own family member. In Marriage Story, it’s a semi-autobiographical story about the director, Noah Baumbach’s own personal experience with divorce.
Both stories very personal and made pretty much for themselves, but the main thing that helped make them universal for other people to enjoy was the fact that they made everything easy to understand and broad. The author Steven Pinker would describe this is as the curse of knowledge and when you remember that other people are going to have to understand something other then you, then you’ve made something that audiences will want to engage with.
“Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know… The in ability to set aside something that you know but that someone else does not know is such a pervasive affliction of the human mind that psychologists keep discovering related versions of it and giving it new names” (Pinker 59).
Going back to both of those films, the audience doesn’t struggle to relate to it, because the stories are about something much broader and more human. 1917 isn’t about a specific battle or battalion it’s about a feeling and a relation between friends and family and Marriage Story is the same thing, it not about a specific court case or how divorce works, it the toll divorce and a broken family can take on people and most people can relate to that. Both films scripts weren’t using highly sophisticated language with very niche dialogue and vocabulary It was much more down to earth, which is why it was relatable to all kind of different people.
So overall, yes I believe audience is the most important thing and any type of author or creator needs to be thinking about them in the back of their heads, but no it doesn’t have to be any kind of specific people, it can be anyone, but it needs to be someone, even if it’s yourself.
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