Aditi:Have you read today’s C&H comic strip? LOL.
Anjali:OMG. I did! I totally get why Calvin got so mad. Happens to me all the time. ROFL.
When we talk to someone, we choose our topics and style of conversation depending on who we are talking to. Do you think Aditi would speak to her grandmother in LOLs and OMGs?
Dear Grandma,
How're you? I've been spending my holidays reading a series of comic books. It's about a boy and his pet tiger, who he thinks is real. They're funny. I'll tell you more about them when I see you.
Love,
Aditi
The idea that the audience influences our conversation is obvious when the audience is in front of us.
When we write, the audience is hidden. However, it's important to remember that the act of writing implicitly calls upon someone to read it. Who are we calling upon to read what we write? For instance, this column talks about the skill of writing. Do you think it will interest your PT teacher?
If you have a clear idea about who you are writing for, you can model the language and plot of your story accordingly. Instead, if you set out to write a story “for everyone” or for “readers of all ages” or for a “wide audience”, your story will lose focus.
Here are a few questions to ask before you sit down to write a story. Who are you writing for? Don't hesitate to get specific. Are you writing for men, women, or both? What age group do your readers fall in? What parts of your story will interest them? Do you assume that they are already familiar with certain portions of your story and skip explaining them? Do you explain these bits anyway?
What is the best way to know what your audience wants? Do they like stories about people like them? Do they like stories from a distant land? Your story may be about imaginary aliens and extinct dinosaurs but your audience is human. Talk to them. Ask them what kind of stories they want to read. Are they stories about underdogs, relationships, loss, faith, and so on?
Apart from talking to your family, friends, relatives, and friends of friends, listen to shows on the radio, watch programmes on TV, read articles in newspapers, or monitor websites where members of your target audience shares their thoughts on stories that they like. This will help you gain greater insight into the preferences that your target audience may have.
While your audience helps you focus on the bigger picture—the subject and the style—it also helps you decide on specific elements in your plot. If you're writing a spooky story for middle-school children, for instance, you will not include gory, graphic sequences that may otherwise be present in the same genre for an older age group.
Knowing your audience is difficult but important. With a little effort, you can understand your audience well. Ian Fleming is famous for his novels featuring the British spy James Bond. This is how ‘Casino Royale’, the first book of the series, begins: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling - a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension - becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes.”
Fleming was recovering from a heart attack when he decided to turn the bedtime stories that he told his son Caspar into a children’s book. This is how Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was born. The book details the adventures that the inventor Commander Caractacus Pott and his family have aboard the magical car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which can float on water and fly.
The book begins, thus:
“Most motor-cars are conglomerations (this is a long word for bundles) of steel and wire and rubber and plastic, and electricity and oil and petrol and water, and the toffee papers you pushed down the crack in the back seat last Sunday. Smoke comes out of the back of them and horn-squawks out of the front, and they have bright lights like big eyes in front, and red lights behind. And that is about that—just motor-cars, tin boxes on wheels for running about in.”
Do you notice how different both these introductory paragraphs sound? Fleming knew who he was writing for.
Pick a topic that you enjoy writing about. How differently would you describe it to your peers and to those 8 years younger than you? Write out both scenarios in 200 words each and send it to us at naresh.blps@gmail.com
