Last week I received a flurry of frantic text messages from my grandmother telling me to enter a competition being run through an ABC radio show called NightLife.  The competition involved writing and sending in the first paragraph of the ‘great Australian novel’, which I did, or at least sort of did, given that mine was more the first paragraph of the ‘greatness-is-subjective-no? Melburnian novella’.

I didn’t win, obviously, or there would be a glorious new post in the News section of this site.  My grandma was rather more restrained regarding the text messages letting me know, though, as this morning I received a solitary text saying ‘Bad luck, Steph.  They seemed to go for fun themes.  I am sure yours would have been more sophisticated’.

I didn’t disabuse her of this perhaps misguided notion of my apparent sophistication, but her message did make me realise that I’d mistargeted my submission by not taking into consideration the audience.  Usually, when I write, I’m writing for editors and readers, people who set time aside to read, to engage with material, who expect certain conventions or are intriguedly happy to see them flouted or bent a little.  I write very much for a textual medium, obviously, there are significant differences between this and other media.  Perhaps I’m not the most perspicacious in that although this is obviously something I’ve considered, it’s perhaps not something I’ve given enough weight to, or have incorporated into my work.

So, whilst there might well be a subset of Nightlife listeners who are glorious bookworms who flaunt their sexy collections of first edition hardcovers, probably the larger group is those who aren’t.  And perhaps the aforementioned bookworms like to listen to Nightlife for something different, for a way to get away from their books and so forth.  So, not only should I have been writing for these people, but I should’ve taken more properly into consideration the medium, the fact that the winning entries would be read aloud, and if there were say, six entries to be read aloud, short, snappy and pithy trumps, say, a funereal dirge (although here I should clarify that there was nothing funereal or dirge-like in my entry.  Promise).

I really should send a flurry of texts thanking my grandma for setting aglow the dim little lightbulb in my head.