: Re: A question on determining audience I'm taking a writing course and the biggest challenge I'm facing is figuring out my audience — particularly for something I have written where I didn't have

@Deb2945533

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I believe you are being too specific when you're looking at who your audience is. Suggesting your passage would be solely interesting to collectors of objects would be like suggesting that Jules Verne's extensive explanation of marine biology in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would only be interesting to people who took a particular interest in marine biology. But we know Jules Verne wrote for a much larger audience - for everyone who is excited by the notion of voyage, discovery, adventure. In fact, the modern reader who actually knows a little biology would quickly realise that Jules Verne's "science" is outdated and mostly wrong. (Verne did his research meticulously, it's just that we've discovered a thing or two since his day.) Nonetheless, his stories maintain popularity because we are still excited by adventure and discovery.

You should be thinking who your audience is right along with figuring out your themes: basically, first you'd be figuring out what you're saying, and who you're saying it to. Then you make the details appropriate to the audience. Not the other way round. For example, if you wish to write a story for children, you would avoid gory details. But those same details would be perfectly appropriate in an adult work, where you wish to shock readers out of their calm.

It is not only age, of course, that divides your audience. You need to consider whether your audience is very familiar with what you're writing about, or would need an introduction. This is particularly true of texts meant first and foremost for providing information: a schoolbook or a "popular science" book would be going over basics, where an academic article would expect you to already be familiar with those. But the same consideration also enters fiction writing: if I'm writing about an element that has cultural significance for an audience that shares that culture, I can use shorthand: I can use a gesture without explaining it, for instance. If my audience is other cultures, I'd need to explain.

You are right, too, that different audiences have different interests. A sci-fi reader would be interested in the construction of a spaceship. If I set an erotic novel on the same spaceship, the readers would have little patience for engineering, and would much rather read about the "equipment" of the aliens. This is exactly where what you're telling enters - once you've figured out whether you're writing a sci-fi novel or erotica in space, you provide the kind of details that would be interesting to the audience of your story. If you did it the other way, neither the sci-fi readers nor the erotica readers would enjoy your story very much.

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