Your Intended Audience Affects Your Content

Who are you writing for? It's one of those questions that everybody is going to ask you. For one thing, your target demographic will affect how one would market your writing. But before that, your intended audience will affect what it is you write, and how you write it.

A book intended for 1st graders is not going to have overly complex words or sentence structures. It also isn't going to be about drug abuse or murder. Nor will characters speak in a snarky or sarcastic tone. All of that stuff would be way over the head of the people such a story would be intended for.

I look at a show like Futurama and I see examples of both what to do and what not to do (or perhaps a shift in intended audience). In the original run of the show, it was very clever. Not only did they draw amusing comparisons between the future and our present day, but they had subtle jokes that you had to pay attention to catch. The best examples were silent visual comedy.

One example was a sign outside of a prison that read "Commander Riker's Island", a wonderful Star Trek reference, blended in with a well-known prison, and it was just there. Nobody said it out loud or made reference to it in the episode. It was just there for the careful observer to appreciate.

Another example came from an episode where Bender was breaking into a cigar shop at night to steal a $10,000 cigar. He drops down from the ceiling and sees the cigar in a glass display case, so he pulls out a suction cup and a diamond the size of a large dog's head, and uses the diamond to cut a hole in the glass. When he stows the cigar, he throws the diamond into the trash and leaves. Again, nobody needed to explain the joke or talk about it. It was just there and the people who were clever enough to realize what just happened got to enjoy that treat.

After the show was canceled and resurrected, everything was different. The show got dumber. All the characters seemed to get louder. They loved to announce what was going on. It was almost as though the writers all decided that they weren't going to bother writing a joke unless everybody knew that they had made one and that they all definitely got the joke. And in doing so, the show lost all of the charm and humor it once had (and that's not even considering the plots).

As I said earlier, this could be either a case of the writers not considering who their audience is, or it could be a case of the show changing who its intended audience is. I can't say for sure which it is, but in either case, I know that the older episodes are still excellent and the new ones are garbage (at least to me).

Who are you writing for? Consider that question carefully. It may end up guiding you more than any other consideration.