(90 sec read.) Today’s 90-second writing tip can help you focus your voice, find more specificity, and break out of overwhelm. Since you can do anything you want in creative writing, it’s easy to wander around and get lost. If you’d like a simple compass that keeps your pen moving in a coherent direction, try writing for one specific person.
Today’s 90-Second Writing Tip: Audience of One
Instead of writing for “someone” write for an ACTUAL PERSON. Your best friend. Your crush. An author you admire. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Writing gets easier when you know who it’s for. You probably speak differently to your dog and to your boss. You’ll write differently for different people, too.
Picking a specific listener helps you know what to say. And how to say it. And, maybe most importantly, it helps you know what to leave out.
The joy (and horror) of writing is the UNBOUNDED FREEDOM. On the page, you can do anything you want. This can make it hard to know what to do.
One way to narrow your options so that it’s easier to make confident writing choices is to target your reader.
Some folks do this by relying on tropes (like “the grumpy one always turns out to have a heart of gold”) or genre conventions (like “romance readers demand a happy ending.”) Others do it by writing only to please themselves and trying to forget about the readers at all, so that they’re their own target audience.
I like the tactic of writing for a specific person. Not a class of people, a type of person, or for myself. When I see my work as more like a letter or a postcard, it inspires me to be joyful and clear.
Writing can feel lonely or abstract; scrawling glyphs and runes on a page, with the vague hope that a stranger might be moved by them at an unspecified later date in a room you’ll never see. But, writing isn’t abstract or “for the muse” or “for the world” or “for the void.” It’s a bid for human-to-human communication, just like a phone call to a best friend or a risky but bold text message to your crush.
If you’re struggling to stay motivated with your writing habit, or you feel overwhelmed about how to shape or edit your work, see if writing for one person can help.
(Wanna try it but having trouble getting started? Try 55 Ways to Stop Procrastination.)
xo, megan
Thanks for giving this a few minutes. I hope it felt supportive.
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