Writing is like a game where the energy and blood-flow of a competitor is channeled into outwitting his opponent and consequently winning the game. As far as the game is concerned, his opponent is his greatest challenge. This opponent is the one who receives the competitor's series of tactics and consequently gets conquered.
In writing, the writer is the competitor and his audience is the opponent. The audience receives the writer's piece and then gets carried away by the message in the piece. Once the audience gets carried away, the writer has won.
Be you a screenwriter, a script-writer, a freelance writer, a book writer, a speech writer or whatever writer, there are certain things you should understand.
A writer does not write for his own consumption. A writer does not need the message he is writing; he already has it. A writer does not celebrate himself for the good piece he has written. He does not judge himself to know whether he has done well or not. He is not a writer yet until he gets an audience. A writer is not complete until he gets into the game; the game where he competes with his audience; the game which is all about the writer versus his audience; the scenario where the writer gets into the game and accepts his audience as his opponent, and then puts up his gimmicks to win the opponent.
Writing is not easy when you do not know how to write for your audience.
Writing entails putting down a group of words that are capable of winning the hearts of your audience.
Remember it's a game. If you write what your audience likes, you win. But if you write what they don't like, you lose.
So I repeat; writing is not easy when you can't win your audience.
Anyway, there are some steps you need to take in order to ensure your audience is pleased with whatever you have written.
All you have to do is to always write relative to your audience.
In the first steps of writing which may be gathering of ideas, you need to identify the kind of ideas that will yield the kind of messages in the piece of your writing which your audience will like to read or receive.
For instance, in screen writing, if you have some ideas for a feature film that has its theme centered on "child not bride", you have to be clever enough to know that your audience will like to see a girl child who is very helpless and has no opinion about whatever her marital status would be.
A theme like this is very critical in the sense that a greater percentage of the audience knows that a girl child who has the power to decide her marital status cannot allow herself to become a bride at very early stage of her life.
So in your script, if you make the mistake of letting your character, the girl child to have some power to decide for herself and yet goes ahead and marries a man old enough to be her father, then your audience may frown at your work. Your audience would wish the girl child was helpless.
If the girl child was actually helpless, it would mean that the act of forcing a girl child into marriage is a repugnant act. Such an act cannot happen if the girl child had some power or an opinion about her marital status, or if her parents were knowledgeable enough.
In order words, you should examine what your audience thinks about a particular theme or message which your work showcases.
Write your imaginations, but write them from your audience's point of view.
Write what's on your mind, but edit it to suit what's on your audience's mind.
Think about what you are going to write, then think about how your audience is going to see it.
Come up with your ideas, and then develop them into what your audience thinks about those ideas.
If you are a screen writer, build your story; but build it around your audience. Tell the story the way your audience would have loved to tell it. Send your message exactly in the same way they would love to receive it.
Let the characters you create be the characters your audience love to be or love not to be. Let the characters be the characters they wonder about, yet would accept.
Let the dialogues of those characters be what your audience hope those characters would speak.
Let your work be what they anticipate, and yet let the work be filled with a lot of suspense. You will do this in such a way that your audience would anticipate a particular action, but yet they wouldn't know when and how that action would manifest.
In a more explicit and psychological way, you let your audience write for you. You let them tell you what to write for them.
Let your audience minds speak to your own mind.
When you would have observed some of these guidelines, I'm sure you, the writer would win your audience, the opponent.
Written by: Winston 'Winny Greazy' Oge
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