Before the reader, the work
There’s a particular kind of humility that shows up in the writing process and looks, at first glance, like virtue.
Who am I to think this could be published?
Why would anyone want to read this?
It’s the kind of thinking that keeps the writer small, but it also keeps the stakes low. And it can disguise itself as moral restraint—as if wanting to be read is somehow indulgent, or driven by ego alone.
I don’t think that’s true—and wanting an audience is not a bad thing.
The desire to be read is much more basic than that, nearly primal. Social. It’s the impulse toward dialogue, toward being in contact with other people. It’s also emotional—the desire to be witnessed, to have an inner experience land somewhere outside the body.
When the audience becomes too real
But there is something adjacent to all this that can quietly unravel your trust in a piece of writing while it’s still forming, and that’s the moment the audience becomes too real, too specific, or too present in the room.
When that happens, the center of gravity shifts. Instead of following the internal logic of the piece you’re building—the strange, associative, not-yet-articulated thing trying to take shape—you begin to subtly adjust it. You imagine how a sentence will land with someone else. You anticipate confusion, approval, or judgment. You start to explain a little too much, or angle a little too clearly.
It doesn’t take much: even a degree or two is enough to turn the work away from itself.
Protecting the creative process
If your process depends on discovery—on staying with something partially hidden until it reveals itself—then you need a certain kind of protection in the early stages, even the middle ones. Not from the idea of being read, but from the feeling of being assessed.
So much of our writing requires sustained inward attention. It asks you to follow threads that don’t yet make sense, to linger in ambiguity, or to let something form before you know what it is. Too much outward orientation interrupts that.
Should writers think about audience at all?
The question isn’t whether to care about an audience or not, but when.
There’s a phase where the work benefits from being in conversation with a reader—where clarity, shape, and communication come into focus. But before that, the primary responsibility is not to the audience, but to the work itself. To let the work say what it’s trying to say, in its own language, without interference.
Protecting that phase isn’t about shrinking your ambitions. It’s what allows the work to become something worth sharing in the first place.
I write from my experience as a creative mentor, supporting writers through deeply personalized one-on-one practice. You can learn more about creative mentorship here.