May 15, 2025
To:SS W
(Warning from the future me: this comment became a LOT longer than I expected)
Admittedly, I enjoy typing long comments when I feel comfortable doing so. Still, I’m glad you liked it. And I honestly didn’t really think you were blaming the readers; the frustration you described made sense. I guess I just have a habit of catching specific sentences people say and unrolling it into something way beyond what it was supposed to be hahaha
As for your questions… Well, let’s be clear: what I’m about to say is probably not very general, so I don’t know how much use anyone would find in reading what I’m about to write… and I’m not really sure if I can answer your questions, but I’ll try. I do want to say that these are very difficult (but interesting) questions haha
I think my writing is sometimes “crafted toward specific readers”, especially in long form writing where I have to fight to try and keep things coherent for the reader (the longer a story gets, the more careful I have to be to not break something. That’s something I’ve learned in my recent experiences). And creating a full story almost definitely requires a plan. I mean, if I dragged a reader through hundreds of pages without a plan… Good God, they’d hate me and I wouldn’t blame them haha
Without going into too much detail (because I feel like I’m stating the obvious), what would often happen in my longer story is that I would plan a structure BUT the specific themes and details of the individual chapters would depend on my “stream of consciousness”. And the further I got into the story, the easier it was to simply let the characters act out the scenes according to their personalities.
… And I also infused my own “messages” into the story in the hopes that the reader contemplated the “messages” and decided on their own what to think about it. Sometimes it was subtle, sometimes it was just a character flat out asserting their ideals/perspectives on the world. I did always try to consider different angles, though.
And let me be clear: I am very uncertain whether or not this was good. Some readers might like it, other people might think that I’m trying to force opinions down their throat. So I am a bit divided on how I’ve handled things as a writer so far. Hell, perhaps the ideas were good but the executions were poor. I don’t know.
For the shorter stories, I didn’t really have this problem. I generally let my “stream of consciousness” do its thing. There was more freedom and more potential for “artsy descriptions” (I think that’s the coolest thing about writing–descriptive imagery. So fun), but the immense drawback was that I generally didn’t have a plot I could work with. Also… if I began a story using an experimental writing style, it became very hard to continue the story in that same style.
With these thoughts in mind, I think longer stories generally require me to think about my readers more. I hope I’ve explained my thoughts here in a coherent manner.
As for the “readers in mind”… hm. I think I generally don’t think of any specific groups of readers in my mind as I write. I think I simply assume that there is probably someone out there who will “like” what I am talking about. I am human, and my writing is infused with my human experiences. So there must be a person out there who, upon reading my work, will either empathize with what I’ve written OR be surprised by what I’ve written due to possessing different experiences.
So depending on the intent of my writing, the “readers in mind” are probably either people who associate with my experiences OR people who I want to show a different experience. I think for longer novels, it’s a mix of both, but short stories probably fall between those two categories.
I do want to say that the “reader in mind” probably becomes more and more specific as a story runs on. For example, if I turned a slice of life into a psychological horror story, I am bound to lose some readers (and perhaps gain some, yes, but that is difficult). I lose freedom as my stories progress… so I think there is a correlation between all three things, haha. The reader, the freedom you have in writing, and the length of your story are all tied together.
But still, I generally didn’t write with anyone in mind. I wrote what I wanted to write about as a way to express myself, to declare my own existence to the “world”, like I was shouting “this is who I am!”
… This is getting REALLY long, but I want to add that while this mindset had worked for me for a while, the drawback ended up being that I had nothing left I wanted to “declare” after expressing it all, haha.
So here’s a little hypothesis: I think “writing with specific readers in mind” is EXTREMELY effective when you have literally nothing you want to write about. If I take away some of my vast freedom and think about what someone else wants to read, I am forced to be more specific in writing. This gives me an outline of a possible story… and the more limits I place in myself in this way, the easier it becomes to create a structurally functional story.
I think this is what writing contests with prompts do. They force you to think specifically, give you a specific set of puzzle pieces within a boundary and leave it to you to arrange them. That genuinely might be why some people jump into writing contests… not necessarily because they want the money or fame, but because the prompt itself genuinely gives them an idea that they never had before. I’ve had a similar experience, so I guess I DID craft my work for readers in the past. Ha.
… Holy bejesus, this is the longest comment I’ve written on HoneyFeed. Sorry in advance. I hope this isn’t just a nothing burger… I did go back and edit for improved legibility… 
Thanks for the thought provoking question(s)... hahaha...
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