It was actually last week that I got to watch a theatrical screening of the 1985 animated film ANGEL'S EGG with friends, but along with some other conversations I've had and posts I've seen recently, it's made me think about the concept of audience and what it means to me.

ANGEL'S EGG is a strange film. It doesn't have much of a typical plot to speak of and there's barely any dialog between the two lead characters, a young boy and an even younger girl. For the most part we simply follow them as they wander through a nearly-lifeless world, the girl protecting the titular egg the entire time. It's a visual spectacle, but it poses far more questions than it ever answers. It's an art project entirely uninterested in conforming to a typical narrative structure. I loved it. But, sadly unsurprisingly, it bombed at the box office when it was initially released and only years later did it become something of a cult classic.

A common piece of writing advice you'll find floating around the internet is to not make things too hard for your audience. Just this morning I saw a thread where the OP was mulling over why a (presumeably) secondary-world fantasy can't just keep the months the same as they are in the Gregorian calendar. There were of course people agreeing and disagreeing over how far worldbuilding should go. Above all I think it's a good reminder that nothing will satisfy everyone. Could ANGEL'S EGG have been given a more 'normal' plot, one that would have drawn a wider audience and helped it be more commercially successful? Of course, but then it wouldn't be the same film. It wouldn't be the same experience at all.

I know I'm not a typical writer. I have been starting to write and submit short stories in the past year, and I'll be thrilled if/when I do finally get one published. But I don't really think that much about what will happen with the stories I'm waiting to hear back about. I'm not scouring The Grinder for markets. I haven't felt especially put down by rejections. Some of this might be because for the past 10+ years I've made a living as a marketing writer, so to an extent, I have a lot of practice dissociating myself from how my writing is judged by others. But I've also spent the past 10+ years writing to other people's needs and specifications, casting the widest net possible. It's marketing, after all.

When it comes to my personal writing, especially fiction, one might say I'm just writing for myself. I would say it's more that I'm trying to write for my ideal reader rather than a general audience. That's not really a revolutionary notion. Technical manuals and academic works are written with highly specific goals for highly specific audiences. But there's also the built-in acceptance that they'll have small audiences because of it. Of course, it's also not that uncommon for something that on the surface might seem "too [X]" does find a wide, if still specific, audience. David Lynch's work (too weird) is now beloved by many, the Dark Souls games (too hard) have spawned an entire subgenre. Even something like sushi, which is now so widely accepted in the US it can be found in mainstream grocery stores and gas stations, was once maligned as too gross.

I have no delusions that I'll ever be well known (I honestly don't want to be, that's part of why I use a pen name or my internet handle everywhere) but if I can write something that just a half dozen people read and it makes them go 'oh, hell yeah!' I'll be thrilled. I don't want to oversell that my fiction writing is anything especially bizarre or avant garde (I don't think?), but I do approach it with a mindset that's counter to a lot of general "make it easy for people to read" advice. Ultimately I want to write the sort of thing that I like to read, and I hope at least a few other people would probably like to read it too.

That's all for now, and I hope you have a good one.

-Verdigristle 11.30.25