Writers: Creating a Story for an Audience or Creating an Audience for a Story?

It’s always been interesting to me to imagine the world during the height of the oral tradition. I picture men and women of all ages, crowded around a fire or in the center of a village. They’d sit together and listen to a talented orator regale them with legends they’d heard time and time again. The speaker would add his own spin to these stories. Perhaps he’d allow a particularly tense moment to stretch out a bit longer, or pause for the laughter from a comedic bit to die down. He’d do everything he could to make that particular audience enjoy his stories, he’d make the story for them.

This is not how writing works. It’s early on in Ong’s essay when he points this simple yet essential distinction out: “More properly, a writer addresses readers-only, he does not quite "address" them either: writes to or for them. The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity” (11).  It’s here that Ong expands this initial thought with a crucial question: how does a writer make a story for an audience that they cannot interact with? The answer comes in the form of “fictionalizing the audience”. This concept essentially asserts that a writer must write for a specific intended audience, one that will both be interested in the subject matter and be able to put themselves in the idle headspace for understanding the work.  As Ong puts it, “A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life” (12).

It is this point that helped me re-contextualize my thoughts on writing and storytelling in general. This idea that a writer creates a “fictional” audience is one with many fascinating implications about the world at large. A question I find myself asking is what the intended audience was for various famous works. Who exactly was War and Peace written for? What was the thought process for the idle reader of 1984? What was the fictional audience for The Bible? And perhaps most importantly: is this how all writers approach their work?

Apply these questions to the second case study and the analysis is both intriguing and unsettling. The clips from Enchanted and The Princess and the Fro” both pursue the same goal: take a classic storyline and revise it just enough to interest new audiences while maintaining the tropes and spirit that intrigued the original viewers. It’s a common strategy by film studios referred to as “casting a wide net”. What this boils down to is revising a property in ways intended to appease and attract the largest possible audience. We can see another example from just last year with the advertising disaster behind the DC superhero film Suicide Squad. When the first trailer (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI3hecGO_04) was released the film appeared to be a dark, violent, horrifying drama centered around disturbed characters. Weeks later, likely following extensive focus group testing and public response, the second trailer was released (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3OZ0eOTLTU). This time around it appears to be a different movie entirely. Vibrant colors, snappy dialogue, several jokes, all set to the classic queen pop song “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Why? Clearly this is an entirely different product from what the studio originally set out to advertise. After reading Ong’s article, it appears that the fictional audience for the original trailer was not large enough for the studio’s liking. Next look at the clips of Mary Poppins and Mr. Rogers. In both we see repurposing of material to appeal to wildly different viewers. Not only this, but viewers of both the original and the repurposing of these clips would need to operate in entirely different headspaces to enjoy them. A viewer of the original Mary Poppins might be looking for lighthearted fun, while those experience the remixed version would perhaps be searching for a parody utilizing tropes of a horror movie trailer.

Ultimately, Ong points out a subtle form of manipulation in this essay that has been used in human cultures since the advent of speech. These tactics for writing for an audience have only developed as time has marched on. We can see it in harmless situations like Disney movies and concerning ones like marketing schemes, and regardless of the motivations it is difficult to not be influenced by them. Ong’s essay is a testament to how powerful understanding audience truly is.