Quotes About Writing For An Audience

#1. The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#2. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain

#3. efforts demonstrated that he had little facility for writing propaganda or even for communicating with a broad audience. No rejoinder was more learned than his treatises, but none was so unreadable.

John Ferling

#4. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

Louis L'Amour

#5. Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.

David Gerrold

#6. For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.

Rick Riordan

#7. An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Artie Shaw

#8. Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.

Lucy Prebble

#9. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.

Irvin D. Yalom

#10. I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.

Kurt Vonnegut

#11. To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world.

Maxine Kumin

#12. I've been writing about Vermont independence for nearly ten years ... and, more often than not, it was for an audience of one.

Thomas Naylor

#13. A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.

Alfred North Whitehead

#14. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.

Paul Krugman

#15. Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

John Steinbeck

#16. No book or magazine article is for "everyone" so know your audience, then target them with your writing.

W. Terry Whalin

#17. What is competent writing? Competent writing is writing that efficiently describes ideas and concepts to an audience, using a grammar that the audience can understand.

John Scalzi

#18. Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.

John Truby

#19. A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.

Bill Johnson

#20. I want to write some books. Books that have nothing to do with music, just some fiction type of books for a whole different audience of people.

Jhene Aiko

#21. Writing, for me, is a combination of objective and subjective approach. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience.

Christopher Nolan

#22. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#23. Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

Tillie Olsen

#24. I try when I'm writing to leave enough "space" for people to have their own interpretation, and not to direct it toward one conclusion. Then the audience would not be reacting, because they are being preached to or lectured at. I don't have that much to say that I think people should listen to me.

Charlie Kaufman

#25. I don't come up with ideas, they come to me. I write them down and try to convey what's wrong with me to the audience as best I can.

Iliza Shlesinger

#26. Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands.
The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience.

Mark Bell

#27. Every week for me was the same audience, and every week they heckled me. The better I got at comedy, the better the audience was at heckling me. But it helped me with my joke writing.

Felipe Esparza

#28. Everybody has they're own audience you know what I'm saying. I write rhymes and make music for the people that I fell wanna hear my music. They write rhymes and make music for the people they feel wanna hear they're music.

Bun B.

#29. Magic : when you create something from the materials around you to astound and make the audience say "Wow." Magic happens on mundane days. It happens when you least expect it. It brings a spark to our drab and monotonous days.

Avijeet Das

#30. I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

Bruce Springsteen

#31. I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.

Jeff Kinney

#32. If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

Matt Damon

#33. Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Christopher Hitchens

#34. I think writing is really a process of communication ... It's the sense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me in writing.

Sherley Anne Williams

#35. It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

Helen Oyeyemi

#36. When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

Salman Rushdie

#37. I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.

Marsha Norman

#38. Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog.

Mary Karr

#39. When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.

Judy Blume

#40. When I write songs I write for myself ... I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

Patti Scialfa

#41. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

Don Roff

#42. And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it.

Jason Bateman

#43. I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Susan Sontag

#44. For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

Louis Menand

#45. When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

James Arthur

#46. I'm close to my audience. I think I have more tools in my box than other guys who might try it. Also, I know how to do this stuff. I know how to write and shoot and edit. I'm technically adept and that helped with the website. You need a big skill set.

Louis C.K.

#47. I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read me again.

Ursula Hegi

#48. There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.

Colm Meaney

#49. Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

Nick Cohen

#50. My goal in writing for teens and tweens is to help my audience feel inspired and empowered today, to find their voice today, to believe that they can truly design the life of their dreams ... today. I mean seriously ... why wait?

Deborah Reber

#51. There's that process of writing it - then you come out of your room into the sunlight, and you now have to complete the circuit and make the connection finally with the audience.

Aaron Sorkin

#52. The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.

John Truby

#53. When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

Tony Kushner

#54. Writing is one of the loneliest of the arts; unlike the actor we have no immediate audience and must wait many long months, even years on occasion, for the splatter of applause to reach our ears, if indeed we are not damned by total neglect.

Bryan Forbes

#55. In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

Lionel Shriver

#56. In truth, I never consider the audience for whom I'm writing. I just write what I want to write.

J.K. Rowling

#57. It's funny when you start writing an album and then recording - the songs begin to take on a spirit of their own. Once you start to perform it live, this happens even more so than in the studio. They really start to develop a personality that takes shape over time with the audience.

Matt Shultz

#58. Once 'Walk Two Moons' received the Newbery Medal, I decided to write full-time. Partly because there seemed to be an audience out there who wanted to read what I wanted to write, and partly because I could now support myself financially through writing.

Sharon Creech

#59. If I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

Jamaica Kincaid

#60. When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

John Cleese

#61. Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

Don Roff

#62. I think films are about having a good time, so I don't know that there's a message. The message of a film is always what a critic writes, and the fun of a film or the emotion of a film is what the audience feels.

Steve Martin

#63. You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?

Jenkin Lloyd Jones

#64. I enjoy writing for both kids and adults, though I think I'm better at children's stories because I was a teacher for so long, and I know that audience well. The process is no different whether I'm writing for children or adults. Really, the elements of making a good story are the same.

Rick Riordan

#65. I don't know why he [Darren Star] is so good at writing for women. Maybe he just likes women. I'm not quite sure what the magic recipe is, other than he just knows how to entertain an audience, and he knows when to be gooey and sweet, and when to be provocative and naughty.

Sutton Foster

#66. When I started writing songs, I was doing it for myself and a small circle of friends. And gradually, over the years, an audience became involved.

Conor Oberst

#67. Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.

Debasish Mridha

#68. I always write with an audience in mind. If I feel that [connection] coming back at me then I feel like I'm doing my job. That's why people come to my music - for some emotional experience or a perspective, either on their own lives, or on the world that they're living in.

Bruce Springsteen

#69. I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

Ann Patchett

#70. Writing for enjoyment of expression does not need an audience of more than one.

Edith Schaeffer

#71. I think all writers write for an audience. There is no such thing as writing for yourself.

William S. Burroughs

#72. I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

Sarah Mlynowski

#73. Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard

#74. If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

Melissa Rosenberg

#75. We know that those things to which we have an emotional connection stick with us better than those for which we have none. Dramatization is a way to get your intellectual ideas across to your audience emotionally.

Brian McDonald

#76. Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

Ariel Gore

#77. I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.

Paul Di Filippo

#78. Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience': They're talking to a single person all the time.

Robert Graves

#79. Everything has become so pop-rock oriented that finding a role for a soprano, and finding an audience for a soprano, is tricky. Unless you're dealing with a revival, which is why I do so many revivals - because my specific tone and vocal quality lends itself to that type of writing.

Laura Benanti

#80. I love nothing more than to perform my songs in front of a live audience. And whatever I'm doing is driven toward finding or writing songs and putting out hit songs that drive people coming to see me live. Because, at the end of the day, that's what I enjoy the most.

Luke Bryan

#81. I know I'm writing better now than I ever did for adults because I'm writing for an audience who know that they don't know everything.

David Almond

#82. There is an audience for everything; our job as writers is to do the work and provide readers with a choice.

Elizabeth Hernandez