Forget the Audience
On Making Things Truly for Yourself
“Something I say in the book is that the audience comes last. And I believe that. I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”
Rick Rubin
Most afternoons, even the cold ones and the hot ones and the somewhat rainy ones, if I look out the south-facing living room window at around 4 o’clock, I’ll see our 9-year-old son, still in his school clothes, playing soccer in the yard. His little blue soccer ball is starting to peel around the hexagonal edges, and the net he’s shooting into has torn along the bottom, so that a hard, low shot passes right through. The misses pound off of the lattice fence posts, rickety from all those ricochets.
And if you look closely, you’ll see him talking to himself, commentating the pretend game taking place, celebrating each goal, because in his imagination he is Lionel Messi at the Bernabéu for FC Barcelona, scoring the game-winning goal of the Champions League Final.
Look around him, at the yard, the neighboring houses, the cars driving by, because as far as he’s concerned, he has no audience. It is only him doing something he loves to do.
Goal!
When I was young, mostly I read: CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain and The Hardy Boys and The Sugar Creek Gang and The Black Stallion (all of them, but my favorite was The Island Stallion) and Big Red and all the other dog books in the series.
Every so often, I’d write, too, my own take on neighborhood friendships or Middle Ages fantasy stories that involved boys finding the adventure of a lifetime. But I never showed them to anyone. They were just for me.
If I experimented with writing when I was young, once I reached college I nearly disappeared into it. I was a broken-hearted freshman, and I started writing cheesy, broken-hearted poetry. No matter the dire state of my poems, I learned how cathartic writing could be, how soothing.
But I also learned that it was fun to have an audience. I started sharing these horrible poems with friends who, thankfully, oohed and aahed over them. I say thankfully because it wouldn’t have taken much to discourage my sharing.
Then came my first novel, written in pencil, longhand, in a red notebook I sometimes carried with me to a bench down by the Yellow Breeches, where I would write and listen to the water and watch the sun go down. I only ever shared that with a few close friends and never had any lasting desire to publish it. It was all about the writing, the fun of creation, the magic of using words.
I see the audience beginning to creep in on my son’s soccer playing—now there are tournaments (real ones) and travel teams and coaches determining playing time. There’s the pressure of winning and losing and practices and all the things. He doesn’t seem to feel it yet, which is good—he’s nine—but I can see it coming around the corner.
The thing is, even though he loves playing soccer with his friends, loves competing and winning, he never seems quite as happy as he does in our front yard, on his own, with the net that’s falling apart, and the blue ball that’s peeling, and the game-winning goals he keeps scoring over and over again.
When I heard Rick Rubin on a video clip say the quote I wrote at the top of this post, it resonated so strongly with me that I’ve been thinking about it on repeat for a few days.
“Something I say in the book is that the audience comes last. And I believe that. I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”
The audience comes last.
In case you don’t know (I didn’t before I looked him up), Rick Rubin is one of the most successful music producers in the world. He helped popularize hip-hop by producing records for bands like the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and LL Cool J. From there he went on to work with others, like Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Weezer, and Aerosmith.
But my favorite story about Rick Rubin is how he started working with Johnny Cash. At the time, Cash was no longer performing in front of huge audiences—he was playing in small dinner theaters, seemingly in the decline of his career.
“I thought,” Rubin said, “who is the best adult artist who isn’t doing their best work? . . . It just seemed like the world had passed him by, and he believed the world had passed him by.”
So what did Rubin do?
“I asked him to come to my house and just play me all of his favorite songs from the course of his life, just to get an understanding of who he was . . . what spoke to him.”
Notice that Rick Rubin didn’t look for Johnny Cash’s most popular albums or singles to see how to proceed. He didn’t check to see what had made the most money or won the most awards, and then use that as a barometer for what they should record together—he listened for what spoke most to Johnny Cash, and that determined the direction they went in.
He was helping Cash to forget about the audience, to make something truly for himself.
The meeting (between Rubin and Cash) led to the recording of a cover of Hurt, originally by Nine Inch Nails – a track now considered to be one of Cash’s most essential tracks. Over the course of the next decade together, Rubin and Cash recorded and produced seven albums together, before Cash’s death in September 2003.1
Sometime during 2022, I started writing a novel, one I had been thinking about for a long time. I got some feedback from people I trust (there’s a difference between the Audience and the People You Trust). Their feedback felt true to me, and I scrapped everything I had written, the first 30,000 words.
Then I entered 2023: the year of quitting things, and I decided to wait, to stop writing. I realized I wasn’t ready to work on this story. Not yet.
But this fall I picked it up again, and it’s been a lovely experience, mostly because I’m writing this book for me. No more publisher’s voices saying this is what it needs to be or this is how it should sound, no more nagging voices saying you can’t write that, you can't use those words, you can’t describe that.
In short, no more audience.
Just me.
I feel like my 9-year-old son, running around in the leaves on an autumn day, pretending, imagining, no worries about anyone who might be watching.
Lining up the kick.
Taking the shot.
Celebrating.
Playing, a breeze blowing, the sun dropping below the trees.
When’s the last time you created something just for you?
https://musictech.com/news/music/rick-rubin-johnny-cash-60-minutes/
Back in the old days when being a WordPress blogger was THE thing, I was a prolific writer. I worked hard at connecting with all the "right" blogging people and was determined to make myself famous in that world (didn't we all want a book deal?), but I lost myself in the quest to be relevant and, in response, I completely quit writing.
Recently, I've taken a few stumbling steps back toward the written (typed) word, but it's been for me, not for others or for that long-lost daydream of fleeting "fame". It feels awkward and halting, but so do I on most days. Maybe I'm on the right path again.
I’m glad you’re writing your novel again, Shawn. I’m confident that it will be what it is meant to be, as you write from a place of joy and without the noise of the audience telling you to do this or that instead. You’ve got good instincts, you know how to do this work. I hope you have the best time wrestling the words down--what an adventure! I look forward to reading it one day.