when you're considering "audience" do you include yourself in that?
oh huh that's an INTERESTING question...
my instinctive answer is "yeah probably," if only on the basis of, like... i do go back and reread my old fics! and i'm often surprised—even older stuff that has more rough edges, and isn't of the quality i'd expect from myself now... it often still works because it has a lot of the sorts of things i like! and even if it's handled inexpertly it's there and i get a lot of joy out of that.
and even in origfic... i don't often think about any audience other than myself until relatively late in the game. (e.g. when i got a personalized rejection on that one novella that was like "this reads like YA," i was like... ok, that's not what i was going for, but i do see why you'd THINK that, and i can definitely see how i'd expand this out into a full-on YA novel if i wanted to... but i simply Did Not Want The Story To Be That. so i didn't. lol. probably would've been better if i'd known that upfront and been shooting more clearly for my audience but rip whatever)
my buddy who makes a living doing self-published mysteries, now, there is a guy who's very consciously thinking about his audience at all times—he has all the data from who clicks on his Facebook ads, he knows he's writing mysteries targeted at mostly older ladies, etc. and he does have to make some choices on that basis—the one that was so shocking to me, because i blogged about it a while back, was the bit where apparently readers in that genre feel VERY STRONGLY about no profanity? ("fuck," said i, the resident sailor-mouth.) but idk, even with him, when he talks about what he's writing, he's still doing stuff that's fundamentally interesting to him and the sort of thing he'd want to read—he watched Succession and thought it was so fun he was like "how can i build the next thing in my murder-mystery series to be kind of like writing an episode of Succession," so that's what he's doing now.
the times when i consciously try to back away from thinking about just me is when i'm worried about being too self-indulgent... and i think in general it's better to be more self-indulgent than less but there's times when less is definitely called for. (e.g., in my Tellius longfic, i would've loved to have more stuff about the hawk tribes, but there simply wasn't a way to do it without committing Pacing Crimes. also, uh, i had to cut.... more than one... superfluous Naesala-getting-whumped-scene... because it did not serve the overall story... but i did... like those scenes... l o l) ((in origfic the classic way i fall into this trap is trying to put Too Much Of My Research on the page, e.g. the Martin Luther thingy i'm vaguely working on is probably going to get substantial cuts where i'm just going on about "hey here's fun historical facts," and again... i must avoid committing pacing crimes... lol))
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2024-11-05 08:42 pm (UTC)oh huh that's an INTERESTING question...
my instinctive answer is "yeah probably," if only on the basis of, like... i do go back and reread my old fics! and i'm often surprised—even older stuff that has more rough edges, and isn't of the quality i'd expect from myself now... it often still works because it has a lot of the sorts of things i like! and even if it's handled inexpertly it's there and i get a lot of joy out of that.
and even in origfic... i don't often think about any audience other than myself until relatively late in the game. (e.g. when i got a personalized rejection on that one novella that was like "this reads like YA," i was like... ok, that's not what i was going for, but i do see why you'd THINK that, and i can definitely see how i'd expand this out into a full-on YA novel if i wanted to... but i simply Did Not Want The Story To Be That. so i didn't. lol. probably would've been better if i'd known that upfront and been shooting more clearly for my audience but rip whatever)
my buddy who makes a living doing self-published mysteries, now, there is a guy who's very consciously thinking about his audience at all times—he has all the data from who clicks on his Facebook ads, he knows he's writing mysteries targeted at mostly older ladies, etc. and he does have to make some choices on that basis—the one that was so shocking to me, because i blogged about it a while back, was the bit where apparently readers in that genre feel VERY STRONGLY about no profanity? ("fuck," said i, the resident sailor-mouth.) but idk, even with him, when he talks about what he's writing, he's still doing stuff that's fundamentally interesting to him and the sort of thing he'd want to read—he watched Succession and thought it was so fun he was like "how can i build the next thing in my murder-mystery series to be kind of like writing an episode of Succession," so that's what he's doing now.
the times when i consciously try to back away from thinking about just me is when i'm worried about being too self-indulgent... and i think in general it's better to be more self-indulgent than less but there's times when less is definitely called for. (e.g., in my Tellius longfic, i would've loved to have more stuff about the hawk tribes, but there simply wasn't a way to do it without committing Pacing Crimes. also, uh, i had to cut.... more than one... superfluous Naesala-getting-whumped-scene... because it did not serve the overall story... but i did... like those scenes... l o l) ((in origfic the classic way i fall into this trap is trying to put Too Much Of My Research on the page, e.g. the Martin Luther thingy i'm vaguely working on is probably going to get substantial cuts where i'm just going on about "hey here's fun historical facts," and again... i must avoid committing pacing crimes... lol))