Who Do You Create For?
Who do you create for? You or your audience? As creatives, we may often feel we need to choose one or the other, that what we want to create and what will sell or get the attention we need is not the same thing.
Today though, I’d like to get you to think of creating without excluding of one or the other—your personal passion or the audience that is waiting to connect to and support your work. I think you always need both. Your passion adds individuality and value to your work that can’t be created in any other way. But art is also communication, so it really is essential that you communicate in a way that reaches the audience you want to communicate with. Even if you do something for yourself, you are communicating or recording your ideas and vision for yourself and that should guide your work.
I venture to say that most of the time, if not in all but the rarest cases, I think our creations absolutely can be for both ourselves and an audience that will appreciate and support our work. We just need to redefine what creating for yourself and creating for your audience means.
As you probably know, or suspect, creating for yourself is about being driven by the desire to take what is inside you and put it out into the world. When you are truly creating for yourself, it comes from such a well of passion for the work you do that you can’t wait to get to the studio, your instrument, or the keyboard to pour out your many blossoming ideas. Ideally, audience doesn’t come into play, at least not at first.
It’s pretty essential to the creative process to start creating without the audience in mind. It will be very hard to create in an authentic and fulfilling way if you are thinking about sales, Instagram likes, or the latest trends, at least during the discovery and planning phases. You need to be steered by that driving passion so you can bring your unique perspective to the work and to the world. Plus, why would you spend all that time and energy doing something if it doesn’t please you to do it?
That definition of creating for yourself may be pretty close to how you think about it now. But what about how you define creating for your audience?
Creating for an audience, too often, takes the form of trying to determine what they want. I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. I think creating for your audience means considering what it is you want them to get out of your creative work. What do you want their experience to be when encountering, wearing, owning, reading, or hearing your work? What do you want them to walk away with?
I’m not saying you want to tell people what they should like, but you have a whole range of things you can choose from when deciding what you want them to get from your work. Look at the reasons why people buy or enjoy the type of work you create. For instance, adornment is often purchased to make oneself beautiful, noticed, bold, etc. Paintings may be bought because they transport the viewer or, to be honest, because they match the furniture. Songs are listened to because they speak to and elevate our common experiences, or they might express our own emotions in more complex or precise ways.
Thinking about what your audience can get from your work should prove much less restrictive than creating work based on guessing what they’ll buy or pay attention to. This should allow you to create with a passionate purpose, not just for yourself, but for that audience. It will help you develop work that can deeply connect with them.
The really good news is that you don’t have to try to create for yourself and your audience at the same time. Creative work is done in phases—usually an exploratory or planning phase (when you’re deciding what kind of work to make and designing possibilities), a production phase (constructing, writing, or forming the work) and a refining phase (tweaking, editing, sometimes even reworking or starting over). You can keep just yourself or the audience in mind during each phase.
So, if you create for yourself in the exploratory phase, you can consider your audience more fully in the production and refining phase, as anything done in those phases will necessarily include your passion and drive from the planning. I actually like to create for myself during planning, for the intended audience during production, and then both during refining by taking turns going over the work with my intended expression in mind during one pass and the audience in another pass.
So, as I said from the start here, I really think all your work should consider both your passion and the audience. Art serves you and others best when it’s inclusionary, not exclusionary. It connects us to our world and through it, the world outside connects to us. You wouldn’t want to be creating for just one side of that partnership and miss out on all you, and the world, can gain from it, would you?
Speaking of partnerships, I’m back on Instagram with my poetry art, doing photo background for poetry fragments for now and would love for you to join me. I know a lot of you also use Instagram to get your work noticed as well, so, if you Instagram, follow me and I’ll see that and can follow you back. Let’s support each other and get our work out into the world. We need all the beauty and smiles we can push out into the world these days.
Photo by Steve Johnson
