Writing for Yourself: Why an Audience of One Wins
Poems written to impress judges rarely move them. A contest judge makes the case for writing for yourself first, with a six-step audience-of-one drafting method and a worked example.
Two poems about insomnia arrived in the same monthly stack last spring. The first had clearly studied its market: a fashionable form, a title with a colon in it, imagery calibrated to the exact temperature of what wins things. The second was pure writing for yourself, the kind of poem that was never meant to leave the house. It described the poet lying awake doing arithmetic on how many more times she would see her mother, given the flights she could afford per year. Sixteen, she concluded. The poem did not care whether I liked it. I have not stopped thinking about it since, and the first poem I could not describe to you a week later. That stack settled a question I get asked constantly: is writing for yourself self-indulgent, or is it the whole job? I now believe it is the whole job, and I want to defend that properly, because the advice is usually given in a soft, greeting-card way that makes it easy to dismiss.
The Poem That Checked Every Box and Moved No One
Understand what the first insomnia poem got wrong, because it got nothing obviously wrong. Its craft was real. Its images were fresh enough. What it lacked was necessity. Reading it, I could feel that the poet's true question while drafting had been "what does a winning poem look like?" rather than "what is actually keeping me awake?" And a reader can feel the difference the way you can feel the difference between a friend telling you a story and a stranger delivering a presentation about a story.
Here is the mechanism, as plainly as I can put it. When you write for an imagined external audience, you write toward their presumed taste, and their presumed taste is necessarily generic, a blurred average of everything you think they have approved before. Generic taste produces generic choices, and I can list the ones I see every single month:
- The borrowed ending, usually a bird, a window, or light doing something meaningful to a floor.
- The fashionable form chosen for its current prestige rather than its fit to the material.
- The safe wound, a grief calibrated to move a reader without ever embarrassing the writer.
- The missing particular, because specifics feel risky when you are imagining a stranger's approval.
Each of these is a small act of outsourcing, the poet handing a decision to an imagined committee. But when you write for yourself, you write toward a reader whose standards are brutally specific: you know exactly which of your own lines are lies, exactly which image you stole from a poem you admired, exactly which stanza exists to pad the shape. No external judge will ever hold you to a harder standard than the one reader who was present for the actual insomnia.
Write for the one reader who cannot be fooled: the person you were at three in the morning.
Writing for Yourself Is Not Writing Only for Yourself
Now the correction, because this advice curdles fast when misunderstood. Writing for yourself does not mean private codes, unglossed references, or refusing to revise because the poem is "how you felt." A diary entry is for yourself in that lesser sense, and diary entries are usually bad poems, because feeling something while writing is not the same as building something that produces feeling when read.
The paradox that took me years of judging to articulate is this: the poems that reach the most strangers are the ones that were not addressed to them. Sixteen flights was a private calculation, done for no one, and that is exactly why ten thousand readers could stand inside it. Universality is not achieved by aiming at everyone. It is achieved by such fidelity to one person's specific truth that everyone recognizes the species. The craft work, the revision, the ruthless cutting, all of that still happens, but it happens in service of getting the private thing accurate, not in service of getting the public thing approved.
Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime and addressed the rest to nobody, or to everybody, which turned out to be the same thing:
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me
Notice she still called it a letter. She still wrote it in language, in meter, in form, all public instruments. She was writing for herself and building for readers, simultaneously, and the two acts are not in tension. They are sequential. The self chooses the truth; the craft makes it legible. Poets who skip the first step produce the checked-box poem. Poets who skip the second produce the diary. You can go deeper on the loneliness that powered her method on our theme page for solitude in poetry, because solitude was not her limitation, it was her instrument.
A Worked Example: The Draft I Wrote for Nobody
Let me show you this on my own lines rather than lecture about it. A few years ago I tried to write about my grandfather's shed, and my first draft was written, I can now admit, for an imaginary literary magazine:
In the museum of his hands, the tools hang
like relics of a patient god, each blade
an argument against the hurried world.
It is a poem-shaped object. "Museum of his hands" is the kind of phrase that gets nods in workshops, and I did not believe a word of it. My grandfather was not a patient god. He was a man who never finished anything. Draft two, written after I asked myself what was true and stopped caring who would see it:
Forty years of half-built birdhouses.
He measured everything twice
and still left when I was nine.
The level's bubble sits dead center on the shelf.
The second draft frightened me to write, which is generally the sign. It is also, by every craft measure I score with, the better poem: the concrete detail is doing the emotional labor, the line breaks carry weight, and the last image means two things at once without announcing either. Writing for myself did not lower the standard. It located the standard.
The Audience-of-One Method: Six Steps
Here is the drafting sequence I have taught for years, built for exactly this problem. It works because it separates the private act from the public act instead of letting them contaminate each other.
- Draft with the door locked. First draft, no imagined reader at all. Write the version you would be embarrassed to show anyone, including the detail you are already planning to cut. Especially that one.
- Underline what is true. Next day, mark only the lines you know are accurate to the experience, not the lines that sound good. In my shed poem, "left when I was nine" was true. "Patient god" was decoration.
- Cut everything written for approval. Any phrase whose honest purpose is to be admired goes. You know which ones they are. You have always known.
- Rebuild from the underlined lines outward. The true lines are load-bearing walls. The new draft grows from them, and structure decisions now serve the truth you kept rather than the effect you wanted.
- Only now, open the door. Revise for a stranger's comprehension: clarify the pronouns, gloss what is genuinely private, read it aloud for rhythm. You are not changing what the poem says. You are removing the obstacles between it and a reader. Our craft lessons cover this revision pass in detail if you want the longer version.
- Release it without renegotiating. Send the honest version, not a last-minute swerve back toward what you think wins. If you want a stress test with real stakes, put it in front of a contest judge and see whether the locked-door draft outperforms your polished performances. In my experience scoring entries from poets in dozens of countries, it almost always does, and the score breakdown will show you exactly where.
Why This Wins Contests, of All Things
It sounds like a paradox that the least audience-aware poems perform best in front of audiences, so let me give you the judge's-eye view of why. A contest stack is a room full of poems asking to be liked. Two hundred entries, and perhaps a hundred and eighty of them are performing: for the theme, for the rubric, for an imagined sophisticated reader. The performance is exhausting to read at scale, the way a party where everyone is networking is exhausting.
Then you hit the sixteen-flights poem, and it is like someone in that party simply telling the truth. The relief is physical. Judges do not score that relief consciously, but it moves every category at once: the emotion reads as earned, the language reads as chosen rather than borrowed, the structure reads as necessary rather than fashionable. I have compared notes with enough fellow judges to say this confidently: we cannot always agree on what brilliance is, but we agree within seconds on what sincerity is, and its absence is disqualifying in a way no technique can repair.
The Eavesdropper Effect
John Stuart Mill said that eloquence is heard and poetry is overheard, and a century and a half of readers have kept that distinction alive because it keeps being true. The reader of a poem does not want to be addressed. Being addressed is what advertisements do. The reader wants to overhear someone being fully honest with themselves, because that is the rarest sound in the world, and we will forgive almost any technical roughness to hear it.
So write the letter to the world, but write it the way Dickinson did: as a letter the world was never guaranteed to open. Do the arithmetic about your mother's flights because you need the number, not because a judge might weep at it. Then, and only then, do the public work of making it legible, and send it out. The strangers will come. They always come for the poems that were not waiting for them.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.