Who is your ideal reader?
Anne Wayman recently posted a thought-provoking blog entry that encourages you to write for your ideal reader. Anne distills the idea in the first paragraph:
Every writing project has an ideal reader. One way to shape your writing is to imagine that reader.
I started thinking about who my ideal reader might be. I haven’t been able to nail it down as well as Anne has. That said, with many articles and blog post and with certain projects that I have simmering on the back burners my ideal reader is … well, it’s me. At least, someone like me: curious, and wanting to find out about something that’s slightly out of the ordinary or which few others are writing about.
That definitely seems rather egotistical, but it does work. Well, most of the time anyway.
Who is your ideal reader? Feel free to leave a comment.
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It’s strange but for all the 30+ years I’ve been writing I’ve never pictured an ideal reader other than myself. That presupposes that there is someone for whom I write other than myself and that’s really not the case. The writing is for me the end product. Really once the work is done then I’m done with it.
Once a reader gets their hands on it they inevitably bring something of themselves and the work changes to suit them, either that or they put it aside and move on to other things. For a piece to give any reader half a chance of making something of it what you need to do is get as much of it out of your head and onto the page. So often we think our writing is better than what it is because we have all the missing pieces still within us; no reader has the benefit of that.