Quotes About Writing To An Audience

#1. 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

#2. Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.

Stephen Graham Jones

#3. 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

#4. I don't think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.

Toby Emmerich

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

Elizabeth Hernandez

#6. In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.

John Locke

#7. I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

Umberto Eco

#8. Poetry never makes any money, and so there's no pressure to appeal to an audience. That makes a lot of things about being a poet difficult, but it also means freedom to write whatever you want to write, however you want to write it.

Garth Greenwell

#9. I realized that if you're trying to reach an audience, being as subjective as possible and really trying to write from something genuine is the way to go. Really it's mostly from my own process, my own experience.

Christopher Nolan

#10. It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.

Robertson Davies

#11. Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you're putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can't second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.

Catherine Tate

#12. Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.

Malcolm Gladwell

#13. [Writing] books is really fun because your "voice" is pretty undiluted. There is a very direct connection between yourself and your audience. You will have an editor, but their job is to help you clarify or improve your voice, not change it.

Liz Tuccillo

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. When I'm writing, I'm constantly thinking about myself, because it's the only experience I have to draw on. And I don't see an exact reflection of myself in every face in the audience, but I know that my songs have validity to them, and that's why the fans are there.

Chester Bennington

#17. I tend not to think about audience when I'm writing. Many people who read 'The Giver' now have their own kids who are reading it. Even from the beginning, the book attracted an audience beyond a child audience.

Lois Lowry

#18. I don't know if I could write ten easy ways to connect with an audience. I know you have to believe in what you're doing, you have to believe in your music, believe in your ability, believe that what you're doing is honest and true and real.

Ramsey Lewis

#19. 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

#20. If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on two areas learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.

Gerald R. Ford

#21. You can't stumble into an adventure. An artist must dance, not walk, in order to inspire their audience. This patient audience who has witnessed all that you've ever performed. So don't be shy. Just dance. Set this scene into motion.

F.K. Preston

#22. I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between.

Marc Royston

#23. 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

#24. The centerpiece of 'Law and Order' is the crime, and it starts with the writing. There's a beginning, a middle and an end. It allows the audience to watch any given episode and can drop right in and not feel lost. I think the stark, raw structure has a lot to do with its longevity.

Danny Pino

#25. But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

Lawrence Hill

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

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

Tillie Olsen

#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. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. An artist without an audience is like a jar without jelly. There doesn't always need to be much jelly in the jar, nevertheless a jar without jelly would feel jealous and empty.

Kevin Focke

#39. 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

#40. Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Henry David Thoreau

#41. I think artists are scared to have same-gendered pronouns in their writing, and I don't think it's because they're scared to be out, because gay artists are visible, but they don't want to alienate an audience.

Mary Lambert

#42. I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

Robin Wasserman

#43. 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

#44. I think when you write an enigmatic character into a film, you have to have real confidence that the audience are going to go with it.

Gemma Arterton

#45. There is a method to the madness of James Patterson's success. Co-writing with him is a terrific learning experience, particularly in the art of crafting a perfect thriller. The collaboration also gives me an opportunity to access a wider global audience.

Ashwin Sanghi

#46. Without an audience, all your dreams will not come true at all, because you need an audience to write new songs and continue to do music.

Rokia Traore

#47. I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

Ethan Hawke

#48. Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, we're thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think there's a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things they're making.

Matt Mullenweg