Ooh, future topic request - how to visualize your audience. I always struggled to identify who I'm writing for way back to essay writing days, where we had to explain something banal to... whom? The teacher, who knows all that stuff already, but I have to spoon feed it back to them without sounding condescending? A classmate who would be going through the same class, who I'd never speak to in a formal voice and who most definitely would not be interested? Another adult, possibly in charge of sorting my classmates from best to worst and then running a trolley experiment on half of us with a lever labeled cryptically with Charles Dickens's use of diction and imagery? There was literally nobody I had in mind when writing which made cranking a lot of that out excruciating, and, while probably not what that editor meant, was the traumatic flashback I received from that "there's no audience" critique.
This in contrast to things like The Fifth Season, which we're just over halfway reading through, and N.K. Jemisin seems to have such a clear vision of her audience that I feel like I'm learning things I didn't know about myself by reading her.
Maybe the closest I've come to discovering my audience was through some dry technical writing for the Navy, where I casually slipped in a Voltron reference into a particularly boring sequence of security instructions. Months later, some of my co-workers in the other building eventually called me out on it, to which I replied "oh, good, someone actually read it!" and the manager liked it so it stayed and now during troubleshooting calls with remote sites they might ask "have you done the Voltron step?"
Ooh, future topic request - how to visualize your audience. I always struggled to identify who I'm writing for way back to essay writing days, where we had to explain something banal to... whom? The teacher, who knows all that stuff already, but I have to spoon feed it back to them without sounding condescending? A classmate who would be going through the same class, who I'd never speak to in a formal voice and who most definitely would not be interested? Another adult, possibly in charge of sorting my classmates from best to worst and then running a trolley experiment on half of us with a lever labeled cryptically with Charles Dickens's use of diction and imagery? There was literally nobody I had in mind when writing which made cranking a lot of that out excruciating, and, while probably not what that editor meant, was the traumatic flashback I received from that "there's no audience" critique.
This in contrast to things like The Fifth Season, which we're just over halfway reading through, and N.K. Jemisin seems to have such a clear vision of her audience that I feel like I'm learning things I didn't know about myself by reading her.
Maybe the closest I've come to discovering my audience was through some dry technical writing for the Navy, where I casually slipped in a Voltron reference into a particularly boring sequence of security instructions. Months later, some of my co-workers in the other building eventually called me out on it, to which I replied "oh, good, someone actually read it!" and the manager liked it so it stayed and now during troubleshooting calls with remote sites they might ask "have you done the Voltron step?"
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