Eek! I was reminded on Sunday, April 2, that I fully intended to take part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge was supposed to begin on April 1. The idea is to blog every day except Sunday, with each post taking as its theme a letter of the alphabet, starting with A. Taking Sundays off leaves 26 days in April, there are 26 letters in the alphabet — brilliant idea.

However . . .

My Sunday looked like one one I blogged about in “Calendars Rule“: I left the apartment at quarter to one and didn’t return home to stay till quarter past nine, having spent the time between at a political meeting, a rehearsal, a mailing party for a local political candidate, and my weekly writers’ group meeting. I did manage to return home long enough to take a walk with Travvy, give him his supper, and print out the pages I was taking to writers’ group.

Since then I’ve been in book review hell, which transforms all other writing into a guilty pleasure I should not indulge until the review is done.

However #2 . . .

I really want to do this A to Z thing. I want to blog shorter and more regularly, and deadlines really do help. (See, there’s an idea for D!) So I’m starting late. This post is backdated to April 1, although it’s being written on the 5th. I’ll catch up, I promise.

So — A is for Audience.

Actors in a theater and singers and musicians in a concert hall or coffeehouse can see, hear, and feel their audience. Even when they’re separated by rows of seats and what actors call the “fourth wall,” audience and performers are interacting. Not only are audiences moved by what’s happening onstage, the performers can be powerfully affected by the presence of audience.

For most writers most of the time, the audience is not physically present while we’re writing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Even when we’re writing primarily for ourselves, we’re consciously or unconsciously choosing our words with someone or someones in mind. These imaginary readers (who may include people we know in real life) help us focus our work.

Here’s an example: My fiction is set on Martha’s Vineyard, where I live, but I’m writing for an audience that includes readers who don’t live here, have never been here, and maybe have never heard of the place. So I need to bring the place alive for those people without boring local readers with too much information or pissing them off with generalizations that don’t hold up to close scrutiny.

As an editor, I work on fiction, general nonfiction, and academic nonfiction. I like the variety, in part because it forces me to think about audience. I recently worked on a academic paper about the evolution of a particular concept in Egyptian literature. The target audience can be expected to have interest in and considerable knowledge about the Middle East in general but not necessarily about Egypt or Arabic literature or the period being examined.

Another recent project was a book about artificial intelligence. It was written for a general audience, which made me a good editor for it because I’m interested in the subject but don’t know much about it, and I’m pretty much lost when it comes to physics and computer science. The author did an excellent job of presenting complex ideas for a lay audience. When something was unclear to me, I asked myself whether this was due to the writing or to my lack of knowledge; in many instances, I’d do a Google search to find out how familiar the point might be to a general audience and how readily readers could fill in their own knowledge gaps.

The idea of audience can be paralyzing to writers who’ve rarely taken their work out in public. This is why I encourage writers who want to eventually see their work in print to start sharing it as soon as they, and it, are ready, and maybe a little sooner than that.

You’re probably already thinking about audience when you write. The audience in your mind is helping guide your decisions about what needs explaining and what can be left out. By testing your work on real people, you may discover that this or that point isn’t as clear as you thought it was, or that two equally astute readers may have different ideas about a character’s motivation. What you do with this information is, of course, up to you.

Coming soon: “B is for . . .”