To whom do you write?

ColoradoGuy

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When I'm writing nonfiction, expository prose as I'm writing now, in my mind I'm speaking to an audience of listeners. It's outward-directed. When I write fiction, though, it's the opposite -- it's very much inward-directed. Then I'm inside my own head most of the time, writing for myself. I only consider how a reader would react until much, much later in the process.

Does anyone else feel that difference?
 

veinglory

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Most of the time I write for people like me, fiction especially erotic fiction and escapist stuff with magical dragons, true love and so on. Non-fiction for niche markets are the same--I am writing for people who share my enthusiam.

But, my current book chapter is an attempt to show problems with the status quo, to change minds. That one is writting to the 'other'.
 

kdnxdr

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I am in the process of writing my first book.

I started with a blank page and with no story.

I am about 50 pages into the story and still it is unfolding only as I write.

I have read it now many times and have come to the conclusion that I am writing something from my subconscious that symbolically is saying something about me personally. I don't think that there is a clear link to the story and myself in the present. I believe I am writing to tell myself something but not necessarily on a conscious level.

Otherwise, I think it's a story anyone could read and they wouldn't have to know, or necessarily want to know anything more about me. For all intents and purposes, it's a story about a woman with amenesia that is living homeless on the streets.
 

MacAllister

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I very much write to a specific, ideal reader--regardless of what I'm writing, fiction or non. It keeps me stretching to be a better writer.
 

William Haskins

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i write to the lost part of me that has been beaten down and diminished to a faint spark in the abyss, in a desperate and futile attempt to fan it back to a flame.
 

Mae

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hmmm....
nonfiction, .... for an audience... fiction... for myself...

I know exactly what you mean: this is identical to my own method... just happens that way naturally.
 

KTC

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I write for a thing. I have had several names for it over the years, but since reading Stephen King's Lisey's Story last week I think I found a new and most fitting name. I write to keep the Bad Gunky at bay. It's a thing, not a person...not a reader.
 

FergieC

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The best stuff I write, I'm writing it to myself. Like KDN, I didn't know where my last book was going. It was about half way through that I realised what my subconsious was trying to tell me, and that realisation basically decided what the end had to be. It's not a very professional way to write, I don't think - you're supposed to have a plot and sit at a desk and write it down and have readers in mind. I can do that, but the end result is never so satisfying for me as a writer.
 

Cav Guy

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With non-fiction, I'm writing to a very specific audience. Usually it's one that shares my enthusiasm for history and is seeking to understand a small chunk of it with more detail than they had before.

My fiction? That's much more complex. I would have to say that I write it either for myself or for my characters. I can't even start a story until I have a character in mind, and then that character determines setting, pace, and so many other things. It's something that comes from within me, but at the same time pulls from without. Makes no sense, I know, but that's how it feels.