You are not an audience

Are you who you think you are? Are you who I think you are? Are you who you think I think you are?

If you ever get paid to write you’re also going to learn about a powerful three word question that can stop conversation dead.

Who’s your audience?

On the surface it seems like a straightforward question with a straightforward answer.

My audience is the people I’d like to read my words. If I’m writing a story about politics my audience is potential voters. If I’m writing about trails on public land my audience is people who like hiking.

Straightforward. Right?

Not quite.

Often (always?) when someone asks “who’s your audience” they don’t want to hear who you hope will read your words. They want to hear you say who they hope will read the story. These are not the same people.

Now you have a choice.

Do you describe who your intended audience is? Or do you describe who you think they think you should think of as your audience?

For a political story the first group might be young activists seeking to disrupt a system they see as economically exploitative, authoritarian and drenched in systemic racism. Or your audience might be reactionaries with whom you’d like to share a dose of humanity.

For a story about trails your audience might be people looking for someplace interesting, accessible and free because they don’t have the means or desire to endure the cost and logistics of visiting the most popular state or national parks.

For either of those stories you might even think your audience is whoever might benefit or be interested in whatever you have to write about the topic.

None of those will satisfy the person who asks, “who’s your audience?”

For that, you’ll want answers like “undecided voters” or “people who pushed the terms ‘Yosemite National Park’ and ‘glamping’ into top trending searches on Google.”

Those are not the same people. They won’t be interested in the same articles. And you will often face the choice of leaving one audience behind to dedicate your attention to the other.

Now you see why “who’s your audience” is such a loaded question. There’s a good chance the person who stands between you and any audience isn’t interested in the audience you’ve got in mind and an equal chance you’re not super stoked about their imagined audience.

If reaching an audience via the platform you’re writing on matters to you the tension around who you think they think you think the audience is hangs over every aspect of your writing.

When you’re not getting paid to write no one asks who’s your audience. Your audience is anyone. Or no one.

Or you can take the more expansive view that completely transcends the notion of audience in favor of just typing words that float into the universe to be seen as pixels to the human eye or long sequences of 1s and 0s to machines.

The latter rejects the three-word question altogether in search of some less transactional form of communication. There is no audience. And the writer is no longer “writing” in the professional sense. It’s more like transcribing thoughts.

The whole notion reminds me of a line in the folk song, “Down at Patsy’s Bar,” by Wisconsin singer-songwriter Warren Nelson.

“We are human seekers, peeking through the glass, down at Patsy’s Bar.”

Nelson was writing about one of a common type of rural bar in Northern Wisconsin where I grew up.

On the surface these bars are ostensibly businesses with customers who give the business money in exchange for a glass of beer or a cocktail or even a burger or a pizza from the freezer.

But in practice, for better or worse, the bars are more than a business and the customers are more than customers. The bars are places of refuge and community for generations of people to connect with others. And for the owners the transactions are the lifeblood that enables them to sustainably steward these de facto community centers for generations.

Definitions blend. Roles dissolve. People communicate with other people who communicate back.

So where does that leave us? Me, the, uh, writer and you the, for lack of a better term, audience.

I still haven’t stumbled across the words for that. When I do I’ll be sure to type it out right here.

In the meantime, I like how Nelson describes his audience in the bar in Washburn, Wis.

“We are strangers, friends, neighbors to the end, down at Patsy’s Bar.”