Authors HAVE to think about reactions to their stories. I spent _seven years_ in theatre. When you write _anything_ to be read by anyone but yourself, there's an intent to elicit a reaction.

It's the same with all art. That's why there are art shows, with the artist hovering around the corner (that can actually be pretty creepy) listening in on the conversations. (Of course, there ARE the artists that don't care, but those are mostly straight commercial art - rubber stamp art that's sold just to earn a dollar) They're trying to find out if people had the reaction they were aiming for.

Let's boil it down to intent. If you write a horror story, there's an intent to scare the reader. If you write a play like Death of a Salesman, there's an intent to drive home the suicidal banality of life (at least of the main character). I don't know _what_ Samuel Beckett was intending with Happy Days. When I worked that play, the most frequent comment I heard as people were leaving was "What the hell was that?" (paraphrased)

I guess the difference is in the way feedback is presented. With plays, the feedback is immediate, based upon the actions of the audience. (For example, Edward Albee put on a play in the early 90's at UH as a testbed, called "The Lorca Play" (actually, it was just 'Lorca' then), about Federico Garcia Lorca. It bombed, hard. It was then mostly abandoned for years, but there was rumours about trying to start it off-broadway, as he was revising it.) Written stories, on the other hand, tend not to have direct feedback beyond the editing stage. Feedback comes slowly, mostly through sales figures. Nowadays, there can be the more electronic feedback, such as part of what drove Harry Potter.

Back to the first sentence. If an author doesn't think about how their writing will affect the audience, then how will they properly present the section to give the right feeling? That's part of what the various writing styles are for - first person, second person, omniscient, and so forth - they push different buttons and give information differently.

Anyway - you can write a story without thinking about an audience, but it will end up flat (Eye of Argon, anyone?). If you keep the audience in mind, you can end up with a dynamic, moving storyline. Heck, look at the Sweet Valley High series of novels. Those had a very specific, targeted audience, and every book was designed to fit that audience (young teen girls). The very same stories could have been written to go after college age people, but would have read TOTALLY differently. Yes, they are tripe, but they are 20 year, 150+ book, profitable tripe.

When I wrote that very short story, and posted it up for the horror contest, I knew exactly what I was writing. I was writing a story aimed at a very specific audience, expecting them to have a rather visceral reaction. For any other group of people, the result would be a shrug. For this audience? I had to get a few private reactions before I posted it, because I was afraid that it would be _too_ much reaction.

Here is sort of a strange cross between novel writing and playwriting. You have the immediate feedback that an audience would give at a play, but most of the stories are written as serials in 'The Strand' or 'New Yorker' (or in some cases, 'Boy's Life'). "Letters to the Editor" are instant, and take almost no effort at all to write, and arrive before the next installment is presented. The boos of the crowd, flying peanuts, rotten tomatoes... I figure that sometime in the next decade, a more standardised format will evolve for this kind of activity. More and more fiction is being written this way, much like the early days of newspapers. I can't say how it will end up, but it's going to be one heck of a ride.