Writing for an audience

The cabin in the woods is a terrible space to write. We write better when we write for other people.

Writers like Wittgenstein or Basho would retreat to a hut to live and write, and that becomes the ideal image in our head. But these were not people writing for their own amusement and then deciding to publish since they had the words lying around.

My writing changes drastically depending on my audience. Even when I’m writing in a chat with an AI chatbot, I drop a lot of my pretension. I’m very aware of what the chatbot knows and doesn’t know, what it will misunderstand, and what I can make a passing reference to. If I’m writing here, I find that I write mostly for myself, but sometimes I think, so-and-so would like this, and the writing feels more focused. I’ve been posting a few things in the TK “libraries”, and I feel like my writing instantly improves because I have a better sense of who is reading what I write.

I don’t think this works, though, if you just make an avatar and try to keep that avatar in mind. That just adds cognitive overhead.

The audience has to be situated in the moment when you write. The situated audience sits in the arena waiting for you to make your move.