cynical approach to an audience

“If you write for yourself, you will lose your audience. If you write for your audience, you will lose yourself.” ~unknown

Not every one is like this. But.

People in general–lets call them the “general audience”–do not care about the writer. They say they care. They may even actually believe that they care. But they don’t. Especially in a forum such as this. The internet. Most of your readers haven’t even met you. The majority of them, haven’t even seen a picture of you. A lot of them, don’t even talk to you. What they know of you, is only what you let them know. And more often than not, that is only what you post in your diary. Your personal little corner of the internet.

Except it’s not personal anymore is it? Diaries, journals–they’ve become an outlet to tell the entire world what you don’t really want them to know. In this day and age, between OD, xanga, LiveJournal, blogspot, etc, etc… everyone’s a published writer. And with being a writer comes having an audience. That’s what we really want anyway, isn’t it? If you didn’t want an audience, you could just click the little button that says “private only” and just like that *click* the audience would disappear. Oh, but the gratification, the feeling of importance that comes with having an audience–especially one that will comment on your writings–is much too irresistable. An audience that will celebrate with you when you are happy, and sympathize with you when you are down.

But, returning to the subject at hand, they don’t actually care. Perhaps that is an overstatement. They care–to an extent. But if you think they like when you are happy, you are sadly mistaken. The reason for this, of course, is that the audience needs verification that someone’s life is worse off than theirs. They may say they like you to be happy, and pretend to be happy for you, but secretly they are hoping that something will go wrong to spoil your happiness. And when you are down, they say words of encouragement, meant to bring you up–or are they? Have you ever noticed that you seem to get proportionally more notes on your “down” entries than on your “happy” ones? On the outside it would just seem that since you seem to need more words of support when you’re down than when you’re up, people are just trying to lift your spirits. But it actually ends up touching into a bit of reverse psychology.

In the back of your mind, you know that you’ll get more notes if you write something really down and depressing, or even something just kind of crappy. Over time, this pattern lends itself to more and more complaintive entries. Even when you’re actually happy, or at least content, you have to pick out the worst bit to complain about, or else twist something good into something bad. Your audience doesn’t want to know that you met the man of your dreams, fell madly in love and lived happily ever after. They don’t even really want to know that you met a guy who’s kind of cool, but you didn’t hit it off, but you decided to stay friends and you do lots of cool stuff together. They want to hear about the awful, terrible experience you had meeting this guy that you thought you’d like, but you didn’t. They want to know how his hair was greasy, and his breath smelled repugnant, and you got physically sick just being around him. Even if its not precisely the truth.

And granted, not everyone in your audience may be that way. Some of them do actually care about you. But as a writer, you learn to recognize patterns. You learn what gets a response and what doesn’t, and you write to fit those patterns. And if you continue that way, unbridled, eventually you will lose something precious, something that is probably the core of why you began to write in the first place. You will lose yourself.

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