I’m not married, I don’t have any kids, I’m not in high school, and I live alone. Other than their occasional shouting matches directly above the gaping hole in my ceiling, my neighbors and I hardly interact. Rent and bills each month are sometimes a game of financial Tetris, but I don’t have to pay for groceries with pennies. I don’t have a master’s or a PhD in any field of science, and I’m not a waitress.
I have finally reached that boring stage of life where I can’t relate to sitcom characters anymore.
As a writer, I think about audience a lot. At least, I think it’s because I’m a writer. When I write stories, I try to imagine someone who would read it. Sometimes that someone ends up being someone I know personally—hopefully it’s not just my mother—but often, I find myself making up a person like I might make up a character. They like certain things, they look a certain way, something about their life drew them to my story, and that something sets them apart from all the people who wouldn’t read it.
Are they a part of my audience because they like the genre I wrote in? Did they pick up my book (caveat: oh, how I pine for the day when someone can “pick up” a book that I’ve written…) because someone they trusted recommended it to them? Maybe the cover art caught their eye. Or perhaps the title was promising. Maybe after they read the first chapter they realized in some way I didn’t that I was secretly writing about them.
I think about audience at other times, though, too, not just when I’m writing. I think about it when I watch the movie Brave because I watch it with my five-year-old niece, and I wonder what makes her want to be an audience of this movie. She’s not Scottish, (she might not even know what it means to be Scottish) she’s never shot an arrow or ridden a horse, and her parents aren’t trying to set her up with the most eligible bachelors in her kindergarten class. I asked her about it once, and she told me that she liked Merida, she thought her hair was pretty and her horse was nice, and her little brothers were “sooooo adooooooooorable!” when they [SPOILER ALERT] turned into bears. It had nothing to do with feeling like she was Merida, that Merida’s problems were her own, or that she resonated with Merida’s story on some emotional level.
Some stories I feel drawn to because they mention me in some way. When browsing through news articles on the Internet or books in the bookstore, I’ll most frequently pick out ones about women’s issues or developments in education around the world, because those are two topics close to my heart and to my life. But that is not always the case. My favorite genre—both for reading and writing—is fantasy, and my favorite series right now is The Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. I have systematically devoured those books over the past few years, and it’s not because I am playing a game of thrones, or because I’m a knight fighting to keep my oaths, or because I’m a member of an emotionally constipated family with serious rivalry issues. I don’t see myself as these people, nor do they represent causes that I feel personally involved in, but I still feel connected to the characters and their world as I read. Why is that? What about a stranger or an unfamiliar place makes us want to spend time with them? What makes us love the stories we love?
As I move into this period of my life where neither Friends, New Girl, The Big Bang Theory, nor How I Met Your Mother, Boy Meets World, nor even The Office is about me, yet I keep watching them, I wonder this more and more. What is it about me that brings me to want to watch Lord of the Rings over How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, or gives me my love of decoding Shakespearean poetry over decoding twentieth century poetry? Is it genetic? Is it learned? Is it based on the people I associate with? Is my love for these things related to the test I failed on Mesopotamia in the fifth grade? Or do I love these things because I found creative ways to get out of P.E. class in high school?
Will I ever know why? Am I supposed to know why?
Mary Margaret is a 2013 English, history, and secondary education grad who went rogue and became a Social Worker in Pennsylvania’s Child Welfare system. Specifically, she works as a caseworker in the Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network finding families for children and educating the masses about foster care, adoption, and permanency planning. She made it over the grad-school hurdle with gold stars and warm fuzzies and is on to the next big adventure: the unknown of adulthood. Her major writing dream right now is to finish her science fiction novel that explores the concurrent futures of child welfare and artificial intelligence.
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I sometimes feel the same way -I wrote a book about 5 yrs ago and the publisher returned it, saying it was ‘interesting’ I said to him “In other words you mean boring!” He just laughed. But I knew what he meant – It was an historical romance – I can’t believe I tried to write a romantic novel. I haven’t got a romantic bone in my body! I suppose that’s strange for a female but there you go! It takes all sorts doesn’t it?
But I did like your article, I just wish I could write like that.