I write for an Audience of One
Anyone who writes wants to reach people, its part of our nature to feel like we’ve reached people. When I think about the story I seek in the back of my head is a whisper about who do I want to reach. While that’s important it is a crutch in others.
In this case I have to write the story for me, as something I want to read. I’m already think about it all the time even if the story remains hidden by the fog. Every time I read about new developments in science and technology I take them and add them to the fictional scientific vocabulary of my world. It’s addictive and adds substance to what could just as easily be shallow and weak.
You have to hope that if its something you want to read, then there are others who will feel the same. You can’t be ‘all things’ and but be you. Its about writing for you as much as it is for an audience.
Ultimately I created a sci-fi universe to create something that builds on what has come before but can stand on its own. Maybe its generic, maybe the story I eventually field will suck but its a start. It doesn’t have to be amazing but it has to start.
I’ve let go of fear once already and will do so each time I put my hands on the keyboard, look at the clean page and see what I can do to give substance to the foundation. For me its about giving power to an idea and and making the reader feel like this place, the story is real, more than works but a genesis for them to interpret a new place they want to explore.
Everyone to me is a storyteller be it to your friends or your family or online. Story is not just myth and legend. It’s culture, lessons and fragments of history and possibility. It allows us to explore concepts and problems in new ways to reflect the world in which we live through a lens that we can learn and be entertained from.
I want to say I am a writer, I am humbled by the opportunity to write, that we have the tools today to express our ideas and share our stories across the planet. It doesn’t mean its easier it means the barriers are lower and the noise and volume of content that people can access is ever growing.
It’s easy to feel like all you can do is drown but you, me we have all the tools necessary to make our mark if you are willing to get up every time you fall. That’s all we can do at the end of the day, keep on going.
That’s my plan, its not what I have to do but what I choose to do because the universe I started almost 3 years ago calls to my unconscious. There’s a character within my soul that needs their story to be told. So that their story can start as a whisper, be heard by people and given a chance to be known.
Even if that doesn’t happen I don’t mind writing for an audience of one or a few, its the fact that I will have done it that matters the most. The skills I learn will be about understanding story, structure, voice, dialog and being able to put that into something that can eventually stand on its own.
I don’t hope, I don’t expect, I will focus and work for the reader to create something worth their time and imagination. That’s all I can do and why I am here. This isn’t a post to teach because I am still a student at the beginning of his craft. It is a post with a hope and promise that I will take up the challenge to tell the story.
