Put Salt in Your Reader's Wounds
Tap into your reader's emotions and tell the story they need to hear
When I was a sophomore in high school, my creative writing teacher decorated her classroom with quotes about writing. Here’s a Robert Frost line that stuck with me:
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
As a fifteen-year-old, I took this to mean that people do their best writing when they write about their passions. While I still bluntly think that’s true, I now consider this quote with a bit more nuance.
Whether they consciously know it or not, readers are looking for an emotional experience when they sink into a story. We writers – whether we consciously know it or not – are telling stories because we have something to say. Often, we have something we are trying to untangle for ourselves.
To go back to Frost, before a writer can take a reader on an emotional journey, the writer has to take that journey for themself.1 So, it can be helpful to spend some time thinking about who your reader is, what kind of emotional journey they’re looking for, and what emotional journey you want to take them on.
Who is your book for?
If you are writing a book, you probably intend for someone to read it someday. Even if you plan on never showing your work to anyone, you still have an audience: yourself.
If you’ve been following along with my recommendations about defining your genre and researching comp titles, you’ve already done some thinking about what you want your book to feel like. Now it’s time to think about who it’s for. There’s lots of factors you can contemplate while thinking about your ideal reader: age, race, gender, socio-economic status…all of those demographic boxes we’re used to checking off. Here are what I think are the two most important questions to ask first when figuring out who your target audience is.
How old is your reader?
Unlike other demographic data, the age of your reader can dramatically impact the structure of your project. It’s not that gender, race, and sexual orientation (etc.) are irrelevant, but they (probably) won’t fundamentally alter the wordcount or style of your book the way that age can. The target age of your reader determines:
The length of the book
The type of language you’ll use – not just curse words or no curse words, but also sentence structure and vocabulary level.
The content of the book
The central emotional themes of the book
I talked about this a little when I visited the Coaching Kidlit podcast to talk about LGBTQ+ characters for kids. From a developmental perspective, kids have different types of concerns at various ages. So, different types of emotional journeys will resonate with them more depending on how old they are.
For example, kids in late elementary school and early middle school are having to deal with the fact that they or their childhood friends might be changing or experimenting with new ways of being. That’s why you see so many stories for this age group like You Are So Not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah where the central conflict is about friendship. Meanwhile, older teens are suddenly grappling with moral complexity and grayness in a way that they cognitively and emotionally hadn’t been able to before. (As a high school teacher, I have an entire post’s worth of material about writing for teen brains…so stay tuned for that another time!)
This age question applies for adult readers too! Are you writing for adults who are just starting their first careers and searching for life partners? Are you writing for adults who are ready for second careers or are facing the breakdown of their marriage? Adults whose identities have been subsumed by their children and/or work?
Which leads to the second and more important question.
What’s your reader’s emotional pain?
Even though this is the more important question, I put it second because figuring out the age of your reader may help you with this. Ultimately you want your book to answer some kind of deep emotional question that your reader is asking…and they probably don’t know they’re asking it!
Another way to think about it: you’re probably writing for yourself first and soothing your own emotional pain. Either the pain you have now, or the pain from an earlier phase in your life.
What if you are writing a comedy?
Whoa. This got dark. What if you don’t want to write about pain? You want your book to be fun and joyful.
Guess what?
Even fun, joyful, and hilarious stories have pain at the center. I think this is such an important point that I’ll circle back to it next week and dedicate a whole post to the emotional depths of comedy.
When is the best time to figure out who your audience is?
There is no single pathway to write a novel. The “best” way is whatever way results in you having a finished book that you’re proud of. Wherever you are in the process, there is value to thinking about your target audience, because it will probably give you some clarity on your goals for your project and what you are trying to say.
Your Weekly Workshop
My goal in these Wednesday posts is to give you something actionable that will help you with your work-in-progress and any future projects you write. So, whatever you’re working on, whatever stage you’re in, take some time to think about your target audience.
Consider:
Demographics (especially age, but also gender, race, sexual orientation, and all of those other checkboxes that make us who we are.)
To borrow a question from Jennie Nash and the good old Blueprint for a Book: What keeps your reader up at night?
In other words: what is their emotional pain? How is your story going to help soothe it? (Or, enflame it, if that’s your jam.)
Comedy writers – I see you. Like I said before, even comedy draws from a well of pain. These questions are worth considering even if you want to write something light, fluffy, and feel-good.
Ultimately, no matter what you’re writing, you want your reader to emerge from your book seeing the world with new eyes. You do that by rubbing salt in their wounds. Maybe this is to make them feel such acute discomfort about a social issue that they change how they think, what they say, or what they do out in the world. Maybe this is to help them heal.
But you can’t do that until you know where they’re hurting.
You may have noticed that I use they/them as gender neutral singular and if you were taught that they/them is always plural, this might bother you. I’m doing this because it’s currently the most inclusive gender language that we have. Remember that language evolves, and the rules are what we make them! For example, we’ve dispensed with “thou” as an informal second person in English and just use the formal “you” for everyone.