On Audience Awareness

"Experience," our life experiences that become our "reality," could very well limit our awareness of our audience without our being aware of it. Experience, in this way, can actually delude writers into thinking they hold the truth in their hands as they write. Writers have to consider the ways experience may actually inhibit writing effectively for readers, if the aim is to come together with the reader in some way.

To have some sense of the way experience can delude us, it is useful to keep a journal, one in which we write candidly to ourselves over time. Later, after the passage of time, we can then read what we wrote and have a sense of what a reader may feel meeting up with us in this way, as a stranger might.

The strangeness, the disconnect between our current self and the author of the text we are reading--our past self--rises to the surface. We come to discover that we have changed over time, and, with this change, our sense of what is real. The angst of the past is nearly foreign to us; we hardly recall the events and the people we so passionately composed on that once-fresh page. And we are surprised to see ourselves engaged in activities that we have long forgotten. At the same time, a delight can come back to us nearly as fresh as though we were experiencing it for the first time.

It's simply amazing.

In this new experience of the "later reading," the disconnect between our past and our present sense of reality becomes evident. The experience should, in some sense, shake our resolve in the idea that we know things "for sure."

The distance from our past experiences, our past sense of reality, helps us to empathize with the audience we want to move. It shakes our resolve to cling to the idea that our experiences are somehow a universal reality to be taken for granted and intimates how these experiences can sometimes prevent us from connecting with our readers.