Who are you writing for?
Speaking to, speaking against and speaking up
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Craft: Who is your audience?
When I worked at Chatelaine, one of the exercises we embarked on was a readership study to help us understand and define our audience. As a mass market magazine, the challenge was that our audience was so broad—Canadian women—it was difficult to know how best to develop our content so that it appealed to the widest readership. And so we paid people to study this: through readership surveys and focus groups, they captured the demographics and psychographics of our reader segments, and then formulated three main “persona” descriptions—complete with labels (doers, dreamers, improvers, if I recall correctly) and names (Lisa was one, the others have faded from memory)—that captured the characteristics of our biggest segments. The exercise was useful—the labels more than the names, because I could never remember which one was Lisa, and even then couldn’t remember the names of the other two—because it helped us recognize that we weren’t writing simply for ourselves, we were writing for a particular audience with particular characteristics, needs and desires.
As someone who had also been a freelance writer—and would return to freelancing after leaving Chatelaine—understanding that different magazines had different audiences had always been part of my skillset. I knew that a pitch for Chatelaine would differ from a pitch for Canadian Living, Homemaker’s (RIP), More (RIP) or Reader’s Digest—because the audiences differed. And as a writer, I shifted my tone and approach to fit with the expectations of those audiences (and those editors). I targeted my work to particular audiences, from coming up with the story idea, figuring out whose point of view I would tell it from (was I looking for a mom in her 20s or a single woman in her 40s to be my main character?) and even tweaking the language and word choices as I wrote the story (kids or children, rugrats or brats?).
So does this approach work when you’re writing a book?
With books, I think there are two levels to the conversation about audience. The first—and somewhat simpler conversation—considers audience along similar lines to the way we considered it at Chatelaine, and the way I thought of it as a freelancer pitching ideas to different magazines with different readers. It’s the typical way we think of audience when grappling with that portion of a book proposal: “The audience for this book is…” Is who? For some books, it’s relatively easy: if you’re writing a service-driven book aimed at solving a particular problem for a particular kind of reader, it should be simple to say it’s a book for new parents, or dog owners, or adult children of seniors in long-term care. But as the “service” your book provides becomes a bit less clear, the audience becomes a little fuzzier. Biography of Catherine the Great? History lovers and readers of biographies of notable women, maybe. Investigation of an unsolved murder? True crime readers. A memoir in essays by a young trans woman? LGBTQ2SI+ and allies and readers interested in social justice, perhaps.
But there’s another level of this questioning that I think is actually more important to figure out, and it’s less about who you are trying to sell to, and more about who you are trying to speak to. I’m still turning this over in my head, but I think this level of exploration consists of three key questions.
1. Who are you writing for?
On the surface, this question might seem like it aligns with the magazine/book audience question considered above, and there may be some overlap. But this version of the question seeks a more emotional answer. Who are you writing for? Who do you most hope will read your words, will connect with them in some way? Are you writing for women? Are you writing for a particular cultural group? Age range? Someone experiencing particular challenges in life?
For writers from marginalized groups, this question is especially timely because the dominant culture has always said that if you want mainstream success, you have to write to that dominant culture, with that dominant culture as your audience. What does that mean in practical terms? It means that you have to explain cultural references that readers—white middle- and upper-class readers—wouldn’t get. It means that when you say “we” or “us,” you mean white middle- and upper-class readers. It means that you won’t challenge the comfort or beliefs of white middle- and upper-class readers too much—even if your truth should be uncomfortable to them.
It means that white middle- and upper-class readers will be at the centre of your audience.
But thank the shifting power structures of the universe, writers—and readers—are calling bullshit on the constant centring of one type of reader. In the On Being podcast episode I mentioned in the last newsletter, Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about who he is writing for—and exhorts those of us who, like me, have been centred for so long, to do the work that marginalized writers and readers have had to do forever: If you don’t understand the cultural reference someone is making, figure it out—from the context, with the help of Google, by stretching yourself a bit. “Catch up! Catch up!” Coates says.
When writer Alicia Elliott appeared as writer in residence in the MFA in Creative Writing program at King’s last summer, she talked about how the reader she is writing for isn’t a reader like me, a white woman. Sure, she’s happy to have readers like me, but the reader she’s really writing for is Indigenous—that’s who she’s centring. And in her essay “On Seeing and Being Seen,” she writes about what it was like for her, as a young Indigenous woman, to read, for the first time, writing by another Indigenous woman. “It was such an intimate and personally revelatory moment—as if she had reached out from the pages, lifted my face and smiled,” writes Elliott. “She can see me, I thought. She can see me…Finally, …I felt there was space for me to breathe inside the claustrophobic world of Canadian literature. Reading Simpson’s stories ultimately gave me permission to write my own.”
Whether you are a writer from a marginalized community or one who is privileged in one or more areas, it is worth asking yourself: Whose eyes (I’s?) are you looking into when you write? Who are you trying to see? Who do you want to feel seen by?
Who am I writing for? I write for women, first and always. I used to be (up until, oh five minutes ago) afraid to admit that, because I became a journalist at a time when women journalists were still fighting to reach beyond the women’s sections of newspapers and women’s magazines. You weren’t a “real” journalist unless you were writing for a “general” audience (code word for white male audience). As editor-in-chief of Chatelaine in the early 2000s, that bias was still firmly in place: Chatelaine may have made all the money (and trust me, it did), but Maclean’s, Canadian Business and the other “general” mags got the respect. If you’re a man and you’re reading me, hey, that’s great. But the reader I hope will feel seen when she reads me, is , well, a she.
Knowing who you are writing for can help you clarify the purpose of your writing and motivate you to keep going when you’re struggling. You’re writing for someone you care about, for someone who needs your words.
Exercise: Choose a section from a current piece of writing, especially if it is a section you’ve been struggling with. Ask yourself: Who am I writing this for? Be as specific as possible—if you can, choose an actual person you know. Now, rewrite the section as a letter to that person. When you’ve finished: Are your arguments clearer? Is your language more vivid, more urgent, more true to your voice? What elements from this rewrite can be integrated into your original piece? (The “letter to” device can sometimes work as the conceit for a whole book: think Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me.)
2. Who are you writing against?
Author Dorothy Allison puts it this way: “When I began, my audience was my mother and sisters. But at the same time, there was this overwhelming sense that the world did not understand or approve of us, and that became an audience. You can write against that. You can write to say to that audience, ‘You don’t know who we are.’ That’s one of the great beginnings for any story: ‘You don’t know what it was like. Let me tell you.’ That audience doesn’t have to be approving and friendly. It can be very adversarial, and that’s strong.”
Who are you trying to shake up, show up or shut up? I’m not sure negative emotions alone can compel us to our best work, but sometimes the whiff of a good fight can focus our thoughts, make us sharpen our case. While we’d all like to argue our cause before a jury of our pals, sometimes our best arguments are made when we picture those most likely to disagree with us instead.
Knowing who you are writing against can help you sharpen your arguments and focus your efforts. You’re writing against someone who doesn’t know or perhaps even care about you—how can you make them listen?
Exercise: Select a section of your writing where you are struggling to set forward an argument. Picture someone on “the other side” of the argument, or someone who is completely ignorant of the situation you are writing about. Use Dorothy Allison’s phrase to get you going: “You don’t know what it is like. Let me tell you.” Does arguing your case directly to an opponent sharpen your insights?
3. Who’s whispering “don’t write that” in your ear?
For me, this comes up most often when I’m writing about family—though it can also emerge when I’m writing anything I think might raise the ire of a client, employer, colleague, neighbour. And in a world full of social media trolls, writers can also be scared away from topics by the prospect of doxing and harassment.
Anyone writing about family or other loved ones will struggle with what to share and what to keep off the page, and sometimes that struggle can stop us from writing at all. (And if you don’t struggle? Either you’re a sociopath or you’re writing Hallmark greeting card copy.) I’m not saying “damn the torpedoes” and write whatever you want to. It’s important to respect the privacy of others, to struggle with what stories are ours to tell.
But sometimes what we’re afraid of isn’t so much the reaction of someone else as it is the fear of the insight we might be about to unearth. For me, this is a lesson I keep learning, forgetting and learning again: when I am avoiding my keyboard, afraid of putting something down on the page, blaming the voice of this person or that relative whispering “don’t write that” in my ear, the voice I’m really hearing is my own—and what’s stopping me from writing is a truth I don’t want to face. Often, it isn’t until I get out of my own way and let the words onto the page that I know what I’m dealing with: an insight worth sharing, a story that needs to be told—or sometimes, something that isn’t mine to share, though the understanding I’ve gained in grappling with it may prove useful in some other work.
Your reality may be different. You may really have people in your family, your workplace, your community who don’t want your words to find an audience. (Hey, I’m not sure everyone in my family is thrilled with every family secret I’ve shared—and I am absolutely certain there are colleagues who just wish I would shut the fuck up.) But writing and publishing are two different things.
Knowing who values your silence can help you tap into the power of your words. What is that whisperer afraid you might say?
Exercise: Write first. Write it all. And then make the call about what you will share with the world.
What I’m Reading
On the recommendation of colleagues Dean Jobb and Stephen Kimber, I’ve jumped into Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I can see the skill with which Cep unfolds her tale of a serial killer preacher and the court case Harper Lee tried and failed to write about. There are a dozen excellent examples in those first 50 pages of Cep’s book of “relevant digression”—where a writer artfully weaves in background information without interrupting the flow of the action: the tenant farm system, southern revivals, pulpwooding, the development of the Alabama Department of Toxicology and Criminal Investigation, the rise of the American life insurance industry after the Civil War…. It all sounds like dry stuff, but dropped into the right place in the story, it both establishes Cep’s authority as a writer and helps you as a reader understand the context of what you are reading. You get the sense that if you were standing with Cep on a hilltop in the middle of this story, you could point to anything and she could give you its backstory: why it’s important, how it fits into the landscape of this tale, how it is connected to this event or that person. I can’t wait to get lost in her book this weekend.
Other Good Stuff
Read: I mentioned trolls above: if you’d like to really understand how social media trolls—in particular, Russian ones—are shaping our attitudes, reinforcing our biases and maximizing our polarization, this piece in Rolling Stone is worth reading.
(And, ugh, I now feel like I need to review who I’m following on Twitter and dump a bunch of accounts that I’m unsure of.)
Watch: It’s over a year old, but if you haven’t watched Nanette by Hannah Gadsby on Netflix, you should. Gadsby is a comedian, and yes, I laughed—but Nanette is so much more than a stand-up routine: it’s a staggering exercise in structure, and a compelling deconstruction of how we tell painful stories and what we hide when we laugh at our own pain. There are lessons here for any writer. TW: sexual and physical assault.
Listen: Shrill. Vocal fry. Nagging. If these words bring to mind the image of a woman, I won’t be at all surprised: they are all descriptors frequently applied to women’s voices. And it turns out that part of the reason for our culture’s dissatisfaction with how women’s voices sound on radio and television is because of the technologies we use to record and broadcast them—which were developed by men using men’s voices as the standard. Shrill sigh. You can hear two women talk about it on this episode of On the Media. You can also read about it in this New Yorker article by Tina Tallon.
It’s a great example of the impact of bias in technology: how heterogenous design teams creating tech solutions with heterogenous users in mind disadvantage those who aren’t at the table or whose needs and realities they don’t consider.
Book Industry Stuff
One less nonfiction prize: The RBC Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction will award its final prize in 2020, its twentieth anniversary. It’s sad news for nonfiction writers, since the $25,000 prize was, at one time, one of three significant national prizes for nonfiction writers. The $40,000 BC Book Award for Canadian nonfiction was awarded for the last time in 2018, and with the demise of the Taylor Prize, the only large national nonfiction prize remaining is the $60,000 Writer’s Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Beyond the obvious cash value of the prizes, these kinds of awards also help boost the visibility and sales of the nominees and winners. You can read more coverage in Quill and Quire and the Globe and Mail (subscription required).
Want to get a sense of who earns what in the book publishing industry? There’s an anonymous spreadsheet where industry insiders are sharing their salaries. The vast majority are American, but there are a handful of Canadian salaries cited as well.
Struggling with your elevator pitch? In the King’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, students are required to come up with an elevator pitch for their book: a short, compelling description of what they’re writing about. Almost everyone struggles with it, but it’s an essential exercise—even if you never use it to pitch your book to an agent or editor, it will come in handy over the holidays in describing to Uncle Jim what it is you’re working on (so that he can then tell you everything he knows on your topic, and explain why you should be writing this other book instead…). One great source for examples of elevator pitches? The “Deals” section of Publishers Weekly magazine (which also show up in PW Daily, the magazine’s free daily e-newsletter), in which publishers and agents are often quoted describing their books using, yup, some version of an elevator pitch. Recent examples: “A hilarious meditation on friendship, fate, and that funny feeling you get when there’s something off but you just can’t put your finger on it.” A bio of Nora Ephron that will “take readers beyond the ‘rom-con queen’ persona of Ephron to find a far more complex and intelligent artist with many layers beneath the glossy surface.” “A filthier, more candid The Devil Wears Prada” by a former UK Vogue intern who also worked for a modeling agency.
Tweets and Stuff
Ever try to explain to someone the concept of the male gaze? This should help.
Baby. Stingrays.
I could watch this all day.
If You’re in Halifax
I’m involved in launching a series of 8-week non-credit writing workshops at King’s. We’re just wrapping up the first three, and have four more ready to go in January, on arts & culture reviewing and reporting, memoir writing, romance writing and an intriguing workshop geared to helping writers understand and define what inspires them. Check them out—and if you register before Dec. 20, you’ll save $50 on the workshop fee.
Obligatory Buddy Appearance
Buddy says “Whatchya readin’?”
