|
Post by James on Jul 11, 2012 4:35:30 GMT -5
Writing for Yourself Vs. Writing for Your Audience Oh, that's good. That is a good one. And I'm not really sure what is the answer to it. Like you, I do tend to consider the intended audience a lot more for a story that has a clear external purpose rather than just me wanting to write. Particularly in AWR competitions, I write for the audience there. But I'm not sure if I really write for myself or the audience at other times. I think I write for the story. Obviously, you have the plot, which should always be subject to the influence of the story itself. I don't kill off a character because I want to kill them off. Or because I think the audience will have a reaction to said death. I kill the character off because the story has reached the point where there is no realistic/artistic way of escape for them. They have to die. The story demands it. But this sort of extends into setting, characters and even the writing style itself. My Lovecraftian type horror, I didn't write in that style for me or the audience. I wrote in that way because it was the best style for the story. The story is supreme. I suppose, though, in a way that is writing for myself. I want the story to be consistent, to be something that could have happened no matter the genre or subject matter. I want it to make sense. And I guess that's writing for myself. I have a personal preference for this and I follow it. But then, the issues of themes turn the question on the head. I had a moment in Phantoms that made me aware that I do take into account what people may take from the text. One character was to discover their magical ancestry as a plot-twist. From the story perspective, everything ramped up to that point. And I got there. And I completely dropped it. Because to me, I was saying "her arc meant nothing; her growth and her intelligence is worthless next to her ancestry." And I hated that message. So I changed it. But again... that wasn't me so much writing for the audience, but more writing for myself to control what the audience took. ... fuck. I think I have rambled and completely blurred the distinction between the two. Competitions here, I write to the audience. Everything else? Fuck if I know.
|
|
|
Post by Sekot on Jul 11, 2012 10:34:01 GMT -5
First and foremost I have to say that I write for myself. I'm an attention hog and selfish like that. If people don't like it, that's fine. I wasn't writing for you in the first place. However, I'm finding that I've had to start readjusting some of my writing, and the creative writing class I took actually kind of helped with that because it gave me an audience. What I think is really super awesome, some people think is rambly or they miss what I was trying to put into the story.
I don't necessarily think that writing a story means that you have to write for your audience. I think you have to keep in mind who your audience is, but at the end of the day the story is yours and it has your wishes and dreams and blood and sweat poured into it. If you wrote a book totally for a particular audience, and they rejected it, are you not going to be upset?
I don't think there's really a hard division between the two if there is an intent to publish. I'm not about to publish all my angst ridden practice writing, and so I do not care about the response. But certainly I'd examine what I'm doing and how it works.
The problem with Mass Effect, since that's a good example, isn't that they shot for artistic integrity. Its that they forgot who their audience was. They went for an ending that might work in a movie or a book, but games are different in that they require audience participation. The audience becomes a part of the narrative. And so the ending did not work. It did not fit with the themes and everything that came before. And so it failed.
|
|
|
Post by ASGetty ((Zovo)) on Jul 11, 2012 12:02:54 GMT -5
Mass Effect, though the inspiration for this conversation, it actually a really bad example contextually. Part of the reason people had such a beef with the way it ended is that, through the whole of the series, the game has turned on the choices you the player/reader made not the writer; but the ending seemed to make those decision moot in a lot of players minds.
In literary narrative, though, it's really the authors choices where the story goes and though a reader can become invested in a character it's really not their call what happens to them. The reader is sort of just along for the ride, a watcher. Not like in Mass Effect where the player is actually developing the story as they go.
Mass Effect was, in essence, one of those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, but it always ends on the same page. So, it that respect I feel that the Artistic Integrity ending was a poor decision because it largely cheats the player out of the choices they'd made. However, I also feel that developing and ending that would cover all the choice available would have created something very generic and unfulfilling.
|
|