Like most writers, when I am in the throes of composing fiction I don’t actually think about my work’s future readers. All my attention and mental energy are focused on the immediate task in front of me. Scene by scene, I have to hold in my head who these people are, what they’ve just done in the prior scene and their prior lives, what will happen next (which, depending on what they do right now, can turn out to be something quite unexpected), their relationships to each other and how they are developing, and scripting the dialogue — or choreographing it, since characters’ conversations sometimes feel more like a dance than like a play, and are definitely a form of action. What should be in the next scene, the next paragraph, the next sentence, the next word — oh, not that word, this one would work better, that bit of syntax needs rearranged for clarity, and oh dear that sentence is far too long, better cut it in half and restructure it … The process of writing is like sandpainting in a windstorm.
Adding in a consciousness of the audience while doing all this would be like the tap-dancing centipede, who did fine until he started thinking about where he was putting all those feet.
Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.
