Episode 1: Fictionalizing Your Audience

Inside Creative Writing—Weekly Podcast on Craft & Technique for Writers of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

What is the difference between a story that draws you in as if you were a character and a story that doesn’t connect with you at all? It has to do with how the writer has asked his audience to fictionalize themselves. Brad explores three techniques that we can use as writers to offer our readers a role in our stories in a way that will create more reader engagement.

As writers, we invent an audience when we sit down to write. Some of us envision a friend, family member, or editor. Others envision a demographic group defined by age, gender, or political or social bent. In this way, our audience is a fiction. But our audience is also a fiction in another way. As readers encounter our work, they also fictionalize themselves in order to engage in the story. If we are not intentionally defining how we want our readers to fictionalize themselves, we are missing an opportunity to engage them as effectively as we might.

In our first full episode, we take a look at how we can be more intentional in the way our readers interact with our writing. We want them to feel as if they are characters inside our stories instead of an outsider simply reading our words and flipping pages. How do we accomplish that? How can our readers become active participants in our writing?

Brad explores three techniques for guiding our readers in the way they fictionalize themselves:

The Princess Bride uses the frame story of a grandfather reading to his sick grandson

1. The Frame Story (using examples from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Goldman’s The Princess Bride)
2. Limited Description (using examples from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and based on Walter J. Ong’s article, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.“)
3. Unexplained Terminology (using examples from Tim O-Brien’s The Things They Carried and Phillip Pullman’s The Golden Compass)

This week’s WiseWord is from John Steinbeck’s East of Eden:
“If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. …A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting, only the deeply personal and familiar.”

This week’s Weekly Challenge is to look over the first few pages of whatever it is you are working on now and identify how you are asking your reader to fictionalize themselves. Then, using ideas from the three techniques discussed, see if you can be more intentional about your reader’s engagement through use of a frame story, limited description, or unexplained terminology.

Next Week’s Podcast – Episode 2: How to Keep Your Characters Alive. While it might sound like a discussion of whether or not your protagonist dies at the end of your story, it is actually a look at verisimilitude and how we can maintain the illusion that our characters are real, living, flesh-and-blood people even in stories that challenge reality. Be part of the conversation by letting us know what things kick you out of a story and destroy the illusion of reality.

Talk Back to Us by leaving a voice message or a text message at [phone] or emailing [e-mail]. We’d love to have your voice and comments as part of the discussion in our next podcast!