Who's my daddy? The audience.

Recently, referring to one of my manuscripts, a publisher made a comment that can be summed up in this joke:  "Knock knock."  "Who's there?"  "The audience."  "The audience who?"  

Apparently, the answer wasn't manifest on the face of my manuscript.

The question is cogent.  Stories are obviously told differently depending on the audience.  (I recall, for example, an excruciating presentation I gave at a law firm during which I wildly - and inexcusably, since I'd been working at the place for four years - misjudged my audience's ability to exercise their imaginations or laugh.  Dead silence.  Vacant stares.  Awkward shifting in chairs.)  

Equally important, stories are sold differently depending on the audience.  And if one endeavors, as I do, to be a published author, one needs to care about how a book might be marketed, even if this job isn't rightly the author's (and, indeed, excessive interference on this end of the operations might be considered to be lunatic behavior).  

Nonetheless, despite all the wisdom I recognize in the "whose the audience?" query, I can't seem to get too enthused about it during the writing process.  When I think of who might read my work, I think "everybody," and probe the answer no further.  

This approach isn't (merely) laziness on my part.  I really do see myself as writing stories for everyone - for men and women, the generalist and the specialist, for those who hail from the developed world, and for those who are slogging through the developed.  (From the sales perspective, of course, my self-image is sub-optimal because not "everybody" buys books: women buy books, and more specifically, middle- and upper-class women, mostly from developed countries.)

But my approach is also informed by a simple pragmatism: if I thought too much about what other people would think of what I was writing, I wouldn't be doing my best work - if I'd be doing any work at all.  Self-consciousness is a notorious drag on creative output.  Writing to her Aunt Bess in April 1914, Karen Blixen remarked, "I believe that it would be impossible to write if one gave consideration to who is going to read one's work . . . ."  (Letters from Africa, p. 5.)

Is it a coincidence that it took Karen Blixen twenty years from that toss-off comment to sell a book?