How to (Not) Think About Your Audience as You Create

A host of filmmakers, novelists, and comic book writers from around the globe weigh in about the role (if any) of readers/viewers in their creative process

“I only create for myself.”

This is a statement I’ve heard from artists for years, including several prominent, wildly celebrated ones I’ve chatted with for 5AM StoryTalk’s artist-on-artist conversation series. There is, through its implication, an integrity that must be preserved by the artist and any concession to other factors, especially the whims of the market or audience tastes, would be akin to selling out. It’s an instinct I very much understand — especially since many “serious artists” have hammered into our culture for years. And yet when this subject comes up, I still find it impossible not to recall director Alfred Hitchcock’s commitment to his audience’s experience, to manipulating them, to surprising them, to thrilling them. I can point to any number of filmmakers who share this relationship with their audiences, including Steven Spielberg. This seems to be true beyond the moving image, too. All you have to do is look at any comic book to understand the audience is an integral part of the experience the creative team has composed. Fine artists are no different. Photographer Ansel Adams said, “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer,” which is a quote I will return to endlessly here and elsewhere.

So, this October, I thought I’d turn to a broader collection of professional artists, eighteen to be precise, to better explore this subject. I very specifically leaned into opinions from artists from countries that I feel culturally esteem the arts more than the United States. I also tried to keep things lively by making sure I asked the artists behind more “serious” fare, especially novels, for their thoughts. The responses were fascinating…and surprising given what prompted this inquiry. This is the specific question I posed to them:

Let’s talk about the role of the viewer or audience with regard to art and, specifically, with regard to your art. How conscious are you of your potential audience and how they will experience your work as you create and write?

Below, you will find the responses I received. In addition to the variety of mediums these artists create in, they represent a diverse range of voices and cultural backgrounds from across the globe - including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Australia. Hopefully, their perspectives and experiences will be of some help to you as you navigate your own creative journeys.

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FRANK SPOTNITZ (creator/showrunner, “THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE”)

Writing is communicating. You are telling a story, so of course you are going to be thinking about how that story is received by your audience. That’s why you ask other people to read your script and give you notes. Are you understanding this the way I mean for you to understand it? Are the parts that I mean to be funny actually funny, the parts I intend to be sad, scary, thrilling, etc., landing as I intended them to?

It’s impossible to be in the television business and not have at least some concern for who your audience is and whether the story you’re telling will resonate with them — if you’re writing a series for an audience that’s predominantly women, for instance, or you’re writing in a particular genre. The audience is going to have certain expectations that you want to meet and hopefully surpass.

I write to please myself certainly, but if I only pleased myself, then no one would pay me to keep doing it. Nor should they.

Frank is U.K.-based screenwriter. You can read my artist-on-artist conversation with him here.

MAZ EVANS (author, OVER MY DEAD BODY)

I’m probably breaking the omerta here…but I’m not a writer who writes “for myself.” In fact, I’m the very last person who’s interested in my writing – not least for the entirely mercenary reason that I’m the last person who’s going to buy any of it.

Creatively and commercially, my readers are always front and center of my mind. This is especially imperative in my work for children. In my humble opinion, too many kids’ books play to the adults who will buy, review or award them prizes, rather than the kids who will consume them. This doesn’t require any diminishing of scope or quality – I will gladly perish on the hill that insists writing for kids is much harder than for adults. But it is to ensure you are speaking to young people in terms that they understand about the world in which they find themselves. What enchants them? What terrifies them? To what do they aspire? What makes them laugh? These will forever be the struts that prop up my children’s oeuvre.

But any story should be a game betwixt creator and audience. Toying with conventions, expectations, language and emotions is what we live for. At the better end of it, we are logophilic conductors drawing the sweetest notes from any and all of the instruments before us. At the worst, we’re narcissistic dictators who love nothing more than wringing every sentient atom out of real and imagined humans. Either way – it’s a helluva lot of fun to play.

Maz is a U.K.-based author of both adult and children’s fiction. Her next adult novel, THAT’LL TEACH HER, will be out in February.

TRIPPER CLANCY (screenwriter, DIE HART)

When I was in film school in Austin, all I thought about was writing the kinds of movies I wanted to see on the big screen. I was writing for an audience of one: me. I had an old school professor named Bob Foshko who I adored. He warned us that the moment we move to Hollywood, we’ll forget everything we learned as we desperately attempt to write for the marketplace instead of ourselves. And he was right. As a screenwriter trying to break into the industry, I was no longer writing for myself. I also wasn’t writing for the movie-going public. That was a thousand steps away. I was writing for managers, agents, producers, execs and screenplay competitions. The gatekeepers. I tried to guess what they might find interesting or funny or weird or memorable and then write 100 pages that would accomplish all of those things. I remember sending a dozen loglines over to my first agent and asking him to pick the one he liked best. The agent was my audience. The marketplace was his audience. Therefore, if I wrote what he wanted – what he thought they wanted – then I’d have it made. The math made sense.

For over five years, I worked a day job, writing specs at night and on the weekends, catching small glimpses of traction but never enough to sell anything. That’s when I recalled the advice from my old professor. I sat down and wrote a new spec. This one was for me. But it was also for the movie-going public. It wasn’t for the gatekeepers in between. Everyone who read it saw something special in it: my voice. That script never got made, but as a writing sample, it helped me land my first five or six paid jobs. More importantly, it demystified the art-meets-commerce conundrum in a way I could understand, providing the criteria that future projects would have to meet. Do I think this story is fucking cool? (Art.) Will an audience think this story is fucking cool? (Commerce.) I know I’ve found the right project when I can answer yes to both questions. Of course, it’s not always so cut and dry. Sometimes a “paycheck job” presents itself and the pendulum swings wildly to the side of commerce. In those situations, I ask myself a new question: do I want to make a living this year? I’m kidding. But not entirely. 

Tripper is a U.S.-based screenwriter.

MEREDITH GLYNN (showrunner, “MY LADY JANE”)

They say – whoever “they” are – that one of the best, most liberating things about being a writer is the ability to create art entirely for oneself. In my experience, when it comes to writing in the medium of television at least, that is hogwash. Of course I hope to surprise and delight and thrill myself with the story I’m on fire to create, but I’m also keenly aware that I’m also its first audience. If it’s not hitting those bliss points for me, it’s doubtful it will for anyone else. In my experience, for whatever it’s worth, it literally pays to know who you’re writing for (setting aside that you’re always writing for yourself). When I was just starting out, I wrote a pilot with the singular goal of getting representation and created sort of a mental Venn diagram of what I was passionate about at the time and what I knew they liked. Does that make me a mercenary bitch? Perhaps. But it worked. And when you’re developing a show, you might (you will) write a little differently for your audience of executives than you might (you will), say, for your actors (when the blessed time comes, perhaps jettisoning all of those cheeky-charming parentheticals).  

When it comes to a script, audience and viewer are not necessarily the same thing, and while I think being conscious of your audience is vital, your relationship with your potential viewer is even more important. It’s tempting to reference Hitchcock's famous line, “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” I agree with the note behind the quote, which is essentially: make them invest emotionally in your characters and story so fully that they are both dying to know what happens next and completely devastated when anything goes wrong. Is it possible to create that kind of investment, suspense and sustained tension without keeping the audience in mind while writing? Maybe, but I don’t know how to do it. Instead, I write from inside the characters’ POVs – their emotionally driven dramas – first, and then almost always go back and reevaluate the story as though I were actually watching it. Am I feeling what I need to feel? Am I scared and excited and turned on in the right places? Am I falling in love with them? Do I care what happens next? If not, it needs a rethink and a rewrite.  

As writers, we make our thematic and dramatic points via a carefully constructed relationship between viewer and character. Is that audience manipulation? Oh yes! But let’s be honest, audience manipulation is one of the purest pleasures there is for a writer of film and Television. It’s our “surgeon holds a human heart in her hands” moment of god-like transcendence! Okay maybe not as cool as that, but pretty damn cool and as writers, one of our most invaluable skills.

Meredith is a U.S.-based screenwriter.

THOMAS VAN DER REE (screenwriter, “THE RESISTANCE BANKER”)

The question of how to write towards a potential audience often comes up, and it always strikes me producers and streamers are trying to answer this question in completely the wrong way. Sure, you can try and aim your script specifically towards middle-aged dog owners or Gen Z fitgirls or whatever other part of the market you want to corner. But if you do, you can very quickly find yourself thinking ‘those people over there will probably like this sort of thing’, and end up not caring one bit about your own script. And if you’re writing something you wouldn’t even want to see for yourself, how can you expect anyone else to like it? Obviously there is something to be said about targeting an audience, but I feel that has more to do with casting and marketing then with the actual script. 

The real question about how to write for an audience doesn’t have to do anything with the specifics of the audience for me. It has to do with the experience of the first read. Bottom line: I’ll do absolutely anything to make you flip those pages, to keep you engaged and to make you wonder what will happen next. I’m terrified people will stop reading halfway through, get something to eat, disengage. My first drafts are specifically meant to hook you and I work really hard on that, structuring set-ups and pay-offs, reveals and cliffhangers throughout. I consider this to be the main job, the actual writing I do for free.

After that first draft? Sure, the script can be better, dialogue could be tighter, a couple of those huge set pieces will probably have to go, but where you invested in the story? If not: I have a problem. But if you were, it’s only going to get better. The trouble is, in getting the script better, deeper, more layered for repeat viewings, I often have to argue a lot with people to preserve that first viewing experience for the audience. When everybody involved has read five versions of the same script, people tend to get bored. A completely new idea will suddenly feel fresh, exciting and the way forward. “You know what else we could do..?” is something I really dread to hear. I’ll fight for the audience’s chance to experience the story in the way you’ve experienced it as a first time reader, designed for maximum engagement and suspense. I just don’t want people to grab their phone and scroll through Instagram when watching something I wrote, which can easily happen if you rewrite a script without thinking about that first time viewer.

Case in point: a series I’m writing right now has two parallel timelines. I’ve structured a certain episode in such a way that it’s a big surprise when a certain character turns out still to be alive in the present timeline. The director and producers all really liked that reveal so I was happy. But now I’m on draft four of that episode and doubts start to seep in. Do we really need this reveal, because (and this is true) it does limit us in what we can tell. And sometimes you might feel it’s actually not worth it and let it go. In this case, I feel it’s important to preserve. The majority of people will only watch a movie or TV show once, and that's the audience I'm specifically writing towards. 

Thomas is a Netherlands-based screenwriter.

WIZ WHARTON (author, GHOST GIRL, BANANA)

There’s no getting around the fact that as a creator you will always be your first audience, so I do think the initial imperative should be to make something that stimulates and pleases you. You have to believe in what you’re creating and why before thinking of who might consume it further down the line, not least because you’re probably going to be working on it for a long time!

It would be disingenuous, however, to say that I’m unaware of my wider audience, especially because I’m involved in traditional publishing. Related to this, beginning writers often forget that rather than gatekeepers lying on the bones of aspiring authors, agents and publishers are also an audience for your work. Although the bottom line might be whether they can sell your material, they’re also looking for something that appeals to them on a heart and gut level, i.e. something they’re investing in personally. And I honestly don’t think it’s as simple as replicating what’s already out there. Yes, you should have a good grasp of structure and language and all those tools, but more than this, it’s the emotional truth of a project that will ultimately get you noticed. One of the greatest joys of stories is how they vicariously allow an audience to rehearse emotional and physical scenarios, and when you write with truth you can take something specific and make it absolutely universal and resonant, whether you’re writing a Spartan epic, or a space western, or a domestic noir. Great ideas are everywhere, but it’s the authenticity of the world and its characters as seen through your unique voice and your unique perspective that’s going to make an audience stick around to see how things turn out. 

Writing is also an act of courage, meaning that you shouldn’t be afraid to be vulnerable on the page or to offend your audience. Often, beginning writers take the line of least resistance. They don’t want to challenge their characters or allow them to be emotionally messy or unlikeable or politically incorrect in case the reader turns against them but this is exactly what you have to do. I’m not saying that you should be irresponsible, just that the audience wants to be emotionally manipulated — to cry, to scream in terror or frustration, to have their hearts broken as if they were living through that moment, so take them on that compelling roller coaster by making your work as unpredictable but as plausible as human life is. Think about the most obvious choice your characters could make in any given situation and then take them in the opposite direction. Put Baby in the corner and see how they react. Ultimately, you have to respect your audience’s intelligence and their experiences, understanding that you are never going to create anything that pleases everyone.

As someone now adapting their book for television, I’ve had to revisit the question of audience again, albeit in a slightly different way. Unlike novels, the visual medium imposes certain parameters in terms of episode length, series length, ad breaks etc. which makes it contingent upon you to create something that can not only compete with all the other shows out there, but with a constantly distracted audience. You’ve really got to grab them with your opener, make it impossible for them to switch off, and then keep delivering these emotional gut punches and hooks throughout to keep them with you. The most satisfying response from your viewer will always be “what’s going to happen now?” We’ve really pushed the thriller elements in this iteration which were there but perhaps more secondary in the novel, whilst keeping its emotional heart. It’s been a really different and interesting process tailoring a project towards a mass-market audience from the get-go. 

Wiz is a U.K.-based novelist and screenwriter.