Writing for an Audience

This week, I sent my NaNoWriMo novel to my alpha.  (The best alpha in the world!  She never minces words if she doesn’t like something.)  Her response has been making me grin like an idiot all week.

“That was a November well spent.  I loved it!  I haven’t gotten much done the last couple of days.”

I love it when I get criticism because it helps me know what I need to improve, but I also like comments like this.  Because ultimately, I am writing for an audience, though to be honest, I’m not sure when that started to happen.

When I first started writing, I was just for me.  I wrote the stories because they were in my head, screaming to get out.  But sometime recently, I started to realize that these stories were something to share, not to hold onto. 

The audience, or the reader, is really the soul of the story.  Without someone to read it, what’s the point of writing it?  Who’s going to fall in love with the characters? 

I love my stories, but I’ve analyzed them too much, paid too much attention to every single word, the syntax and the sentence lengths, that sometimes I forget about the magic that created it.  Whenever I have a reader who enjoys my work, it renews my desire to keep writing, to enjoy the magic of creating and diving into a new world.  

What do you do to keep up your enthusiasm when you're writing?