Who do you write for?

So this last few days, I've been thinking about voice and thinking about what my voice is when I write and who I tend to write for. Everyone's got an ideal reader, a person we're trying to please when we write. Kurt Vonnegut talks about this in one of his books, although I don't remember which one it is off the top of my head. He wrote for his sister. I can rule that one out because my sisters aren't huge into reading. That, and I don't care what they think of my writing.

Joseph Williams seems to write for himself, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think he sounds like a fun person to meet at a party. So I may write for myself. I know I did in high school, but that may have changed. Maybe my problem of feeling a little lost could have something to do with the fact that I haven't written anything of consequential length that I've enjoyed. I started writing something and worked on it for months, but it was unfocused and I didn't like it anymore, so I stopped and started working on something else.

It's been suggested that my writing tends to be very intense and I probably burn out trying to prolong the intensity I've set up. That could very well be true. I think that another part of the difficulty is that I keep trying to make something powerful and literary when I'm not that kind of person who can punch gaping holes in your brain by sheer force of research and verbiage (which my writing hero does). I feel like my voice is more like Vonnegut's: hands in pockets, shrugging and shuffling around almost idly. But under the unassuming exterior, there's a wry, sharp view of things that aren't usually asked because they're taken for granted. Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout
character was a caricature of himself, a disregarded figure who made wild penetrating cuts in the world view of any of the few people who read Trout's work.

While Kilgore Trout usually threw out absolutely batty scenarios to comment in things, I feel like my method would be more like making some unusual but fitting connection so that we can all point and laugh at it. Kind of like the article on Wired today about how Microsoft-Yahoo!-Facebook is like being back in high school. That's the kind of thing I'd do. So I'm still trying to figure out my voice and who I write for. I'll let you know when I figure it out.