Know Your Audience

I’ve filled out a lot of agent queries the past month, and one question that keeps popping up is “who is your intended audience?” I have a standard answer: though my beta sampling indicates wide appeal, mainly intended for adult women.

The less popular but more accurate answer is: myself.

I became a writer as a twelve-year-old out of intense grief. I didn’t know where to put the sadness I felt after losing my Nana, easily the most important person in my life at the time. I didn’t know how to process the guilt I felt for not taking her phone calls in the weeks leading up to her death because talking to her made me sad. Then, one afternoon when my heart was so full of pain it hurt just to be aware of it in my chest, I saw a blank piece of paper and a pen and decided as if no one had ever made the connection between the two before that a heavenly match had been made. I wrote a poem that had nothing to do with Nana or grief or guilt. It was about a place I missed, a place that brought me comfort to think about.

As I grew up, real places brought less and less comfort just like real people made less and less sense, so I started creating them. I created what I needed to heal and to grow and to become whole. I created worlds I could go back to time and time again to feel seen, to work out the hard stuff, to understand the kind of person I wanted to be. Worlds that taught me how to show up and sit with people in their pain. And I didn’t know I was doing any of that. Not at the time, anyway.

This week was a hard week. A week of betrayal and devastation at dreams deferred and lots and lots of no. I have a core group of beautiful people who among many other things remind me not to lose hope. They are there when I can’t receive their words and don’t judge me for whatever feelings I’m experiencing in the moment. They listen to me cuss and cry and remind me that despite my attempts, I am human, and that’s okay.

But again, when I couldn’t process anything else, I read my recently finished novel, a big portion of which I don’t even remember writing. And somewhere in the middle of it, the fog started to lift. My characters reminded me that things seldom work out the way we anticipate and often what we think we want most is hiding the thing we need just around the corner that we couldn’t see and couldn’t imagine because we were so focused on how it should be. I wrote advice to myself years before I needed it. And that’s pretty standard.

It also makes me careful about what I write. Shoo mercy.

Reading it again also reminded me that this is why I do what I do. Not just for myself, but so someone else who is hurting or feels alone or needs to laugh will know that they are not the only one.

Nope. I am right there with you.