From Audience as Place of Performance to Space for Being and Thanksgiving

I have been woefully absent from my blog of late, which I hope to remedy, beginning today.

On this eve of the US Thanksgiving, in the spirit of this holiday and on behalf of writers everywhere, I want to open up some space of wonder and gratitude concerning the nature of writing; space that was recently opened up for me. Our vehicle for this quest for gratitude will be the audience.

In my advice to writers I have mentioned audience before, most prominently here, where we looked at how to show up more completely and honestly for readers and yourself, and here, where we discussed how to be more responsive to your audience as you write.

Today we will go on a fresh journey with this crucial other, who is present in every experience of writing and without whom writing, like any form of communication or other aspect of life, becomes in some ways meaningless.

In other words, we will explore ways in which audience makes writing an essential and nourishing part and reflection of life itself.

Before we embark on this journey, I acknowledge that we are once more about to stray into philosophical territory. This may beg the question for some readers, “What is the practical use of this for writers?!” If you wonder that, I invite you to consider that the whys and what’s of writing are just as important as the how’s.

I confess to having a natural fascination for things as phenomena, and I nerd out like crazy on the nature of language and communication, but part of why I bring these fascinations to bear so often in this blog is because I believe in their practical value. To use an analogy, deeper questions about writing are to the purpose and application of math as grammar and syntax rules are to algebra equations. (I offer this analogy with respect and apologies to mathematicians, who may be horrified by the juxtaposition of “math” and “purpose.”)

In short, I love to share my questions and insights because I want to help you, too, build a richer creative framework for yourself. Not only so that you can enrich your writing, but so you can have a more enriching experience of writing.

So, yes, we need to get the writing done; and yes, we want to know the technical details of the craft well enough to do it skillfully. But we also benefit tremendously by having clarity about why we’re writing, not to mention what, exactly, it is that we’re doing when we write.

So let’s get to it!

To discover where we are going today, we need to first digress into—then turn away from—several common connotations of the word “audience.”

(Note that I am treating audience as a synonym for “readers”). Per Merriam-Webster, it most often implies a group of listeners, spectators, admirers, or devotees (“Audience,” Merriam-Webster, accessed 11/26/2025, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/audience). Three of these four categories strongly imply performance and evaluation. All of them, by virtue of the term “group,” imply distance.

Whether or not you love the stage, which I daresay many writers do not, this means that when you write, to the extent that readers are on your mind, your process is quite possibly derailed from a very early stage—or, worse, steered—by expectation and anxiety. Even if those forces are subtle, the need to earn something, to prove something, in order to become something, is baked into the idea of an audience. It implies that you must say something loudly enough and forcefully enough to make yourself heard. (Intentional emphasis on make yourself, which we’ll return to.)

This means that long before you ever stand in front of a literal audience—even if you never do—you, the writer, are effectively always standing alone before those masses … which might be a group of people or the impersonal and seemingly hostile mass that is the publishing industry. As you write, you strive in advance to win favor or else you scorn it, but in either event, your writing process becomes ruled by a reactive impulse that believes it must make real whatever it is that you wish to conjure by expressing yourself … which is quite possibly you.

All of this, I am willing to venture, is one reason why some writers decide, early and perhaps wisely, to write only “for themselves” or “for their loved ones,” and/or to “publish independently.” These are, in part, strategies to dodge the distorting, self-betraying effects of pleading for acceptance from that unpleasable, commercial, ignorant mob known as “the audience.”

All of this also means that space for proper communication even while you write and before you ever meet a literal audience, and whatever it is that genuine communication can offer both you and the reader (we’ll also soon get to this), is evaporated by all the heat and pressure that has mutated your endeavor to communicate into a spectacle, a test of whether you can be enough to be allowed to be.

So: let’s treat most of these connotations of “audience” as unhelpful, even destructive. Except for one: listeners. Let’s steer down that path into deeper, less well-traveled implications of the term “audience.” Again per Merriam-Webster, here they are:

-          “a formal hearing or interview”

-          “an opportunity of being heard”

-          “the act or state of hearing”

Here’s the juice we’re looking for on this quest. Let’s see how it tastes.

But first let’s take note of another potential pitfall inherent in the word “listen,” which is the desire/expectation to be listened to in a particular way. Perhaps we could say “to be understood.” It may be fair to say that many of us, unconsciously, hope to be listened to as if we, ourselves, were the one listening. Or to put it better, we hope to be listened to as if it were the best version of us, the version even we are not quite in touch with, were the one listening.

This ironically means that, similar to how our efforts to communicate through writing can be distorted and ruined by trying to please the real or imagined expectations of others, these efforts can also be ruined by our own unreasonable expectations concerning our potential audience. It is dangerous and destructive when we hope that our listener will be just like us … superior to us on our behalf … when we dream that they will respond to us as we yearn to be responded to, as if the audience (both in the sense of the person and that of the listening event), will heal us or help us otherwise be better-realized as a person. This is the false promise of “making ourselves” we referred to earlier.

The interesting thing is that communication can heal us and help us become better-realized as people, but not quite in the way we sometimes suppose it will. Let’s focus on these words:

-          “an opportunity”

-          “the act or state of hearing”

I was recently reminded of the provocative idea that everything about our existence revolves around relationship.

Even money, which is the last thing I think about when I think of “relational.” But how fascinating, how hopeful it is to think of money not so much as an impersonal, maybe psychopathic, and strictly functional unit of value but instead as a situation, a medium, which is just one of an endless supply of such situations, all of which are opportunities to express relationship.

And this is what I came to understand recently about the nature of writing and of all communication, and about what audience can (and maybe should?) really mean. If it is thought of as a transaction, as a tool used to accomplish a very particular end—delivering pleasure or precise information to an audience, delivering value to a publisher, or an audience delivering understanding and validation to an author, or etc.—then its richer potential is squandered. But if the very act of writing, or sharing that writing, both understood in terms of the necessary presence of an audience, real or implied, is instead seen as an opportunity, and if that opportunity is appreciated in the mere act or state of listening and audience, then the anxiety and expectation seem to melt away.

Let me state this more carefully: to write is to be, and to be in audience, and to hear, and even to be listened to. To be read, no matter how well you are read or how badly someone misreads you, is to be, and to be in audience, and to hear, and, again … even to be listened to.

I do not mean to suggest by this that all things are equal in the world of listening and communication. There is certainly a spectrum of listening well, listening carelessly, and “listening” maliciously. And there are times when precise information very much needs to be delivered and successfully received, so I am by no means saying that is irrelevant. And I appreciate with all of my heart the importance, for every writer and in particular writers of memoir, who are so dear to me, of being seen and heard through their words in a way which comes reasonably close to the image the author hoped to deliver to readers.

What I am instead trying to do is open up space to appreciate the fact that communication is a phenomenon in its own right, regardless of the outcomes it produces, and can be a source of fulfillment and satisfaction … regardless of the outcomes it produces. Communication, as good or as bad as it can be, as satisfying or frustrating as it can be, always—always—is evidence, however painful, of our relational reality. It is proof: proof of life, and proof of us, and it provides us with evidence of the privilege that we are—not that we are becoming, but that we are already being.

I realize this has become very abstract, so let me take a different tack. Surely you or someone you know has a story of a past embarrassment, or a catastrophe, or even a pain or disappointment, that is now, if not an amusing tale, at the very least an essential part of the lore of your life. Yes? I mean, you are a writer, after all, so even if this does not make it into your commercial writing, you have surely written—or told—about it at some point.

Especially if you are a memoirist or a writer in other forms of personal narrative, what else is going on the page if not all the diverse, up-and-down moments you have lived through? You are not limiting yourself to writing about the times you did not get caught in rush hour or you did not sprain your ankle or you did not have your heart broken. It’s not only the successes that are valid and worth telling, right?

Of course not every story becomes victorious or fun, and certainly we are selective about what stories we will share with whom, and some stories are so harrowing that biology graciously walls us off from them so that hopefully healing can occur. But whatever the nuances, our lives are. We are. The stuff of our lives furnishes and assembles our is-ness. Do we sometimes wish life was different? Sure. Do we sometimes hope our futures will take a particular shape? Of course. But meanwhile we never cease to be, and to receive opportunities be in audience with one another, and this is where our essential opportunity for wholeness, thankfulness, and empowerment lies.

And so it is (I believe and I invite you to consider) with writing. Whatever is going on between you and the reader on that page you have put before them, whatever space is being shared (however uncomfortably), whatever is being communicated (however well or poorly), you are … just as your reader is. And an essential part of what allows you both to be, part of what makes that as real as it can possibly be, is that you are sharing that experience. Again, regardless of how “well” that sharing is taking place.

If all else fails, look at it this way: a so-called “unsuccessful” writing effort can become source material for a future story! It is still part of your life; still part of your precious self and experience, however it turns out.

Okay, let’s come down from this winding journey up the mountain into the clouds of esoteric thought. I want to leave you with a practical takeaway. A care package of thanksgiving as you continue on your creative journey. It is this:

I invite you to give yourself an occasional break from the anxiety of believing that you will fail as a writer if your writing does not result in a very particular outcome. Any outcome is already a success, simply because you gave yourself permission and claimed your birthright to enter the writing space. It is a sacred, essential, relational space, and that space is enhanced, and it enhances you, by mere virtue of the fact that you occupy it, and that others occupy it with you.

See what it feels like to sink into that perception … to set aside the so-called ends of the writing, and to instead luxuriate in the thick of the ongoing means, which is an inherently-relational writing space.

See if you can find in yourself a sincere will to give thanks for that … and for yourself … and for the opportunity which is writing, which is audience, in all the forms it takes.

Ultreia et suseia, dear pilgrim. Onward and upward. May you take one true, imperfect step at a time on this ever-unpredictable, ever-meaningful, ever-being journey.