Writers Life | An Often-Overlooked Key To Successful Writing – Know Your Readers

We writers are lucky these days. We’re swamped with books, articles and teaching on how to write well.

Many of them focus on plot and structure, writing style or characters. There are others, of course─setting, mood, point of view and all the relevant how-to aspects. No doubt I’ve forgotten many others.

I feel an important key is often overlooked. Know your readers─ what they like, what they fear, what interests them, their values.

When my first novel─a biographical novel, Jodie’s Story─was published by a largish traditional Christian publisher, I was asked by a small magazine to write an article sharing some keys to successful writing. I knew nothing about the current popular techniques as it was about fifty years since I’d been to an in-person writing course. I had been lucky though and my book was a very good seller (as Australian Christian books go).

The birth of Jodie’s Story

I realised I’d written my book for a special group of people – my teenaged speech and drama students.

I loved speech and drama teaching. From the day my first student walked through my front door, I was hooked.

Some of the teens in particular told me about their struggles as well as their triumphs. After a few years, I realised several of them were becoming involved in the same things that had been Jodie’s first steps in her downward spiral, which had ended in drug addiction and prostitution. I’d already written Jodie’s testimony for the Teen Challenge newsletter. Her story had stayed with me as a very moving account. (Jodie and I cried several times during my long initial interview with her.)

Jodie had had several painful situations in her family. But … I was discovering, so did several of the speech and drama pupils.

It began to birth inside me: the need to tell this story in the form of a book which might be published so these young people could read it. Perhaps it would abort their Jodie-style downward spiral.

After getting Jodie’s permission to write it as a book, I began. I invented nearly all the dialogue and all the details. The actual story and her experiences are true. So when it was published, it was classified as a biographical novel.
I was concerned I might be too busy to write a book, so it had to be shortish. I set aside Friday mornings for writing. I was handwriting the book as I hadn’t conquered typing then and did not have a computer. That was 1989.

Jodie’s Story was published in 1991 and apparently was an immediate success.

Why? After all, it’s not an appealing topic.
But I knew how those teenagers thought, what they cared about, what they feared and … the pitfalls that lay in their pathways. So I wrote it for them.

Jodie’s Story also opened the door for me to be asked and paid to write my next two biographies. Even now (twenty-one years later) I receive feedback from young people who have read and loved JS or slightly older people who did radical things like changing their careers to help struggling youth.

Not all my books target teenagers. Some, like the novel Lantern Light, are more suited to mature Christian women─although I’ve had a few non-Christian men read and apparently enjoy Lantern Light. My friend Peter read it twice as he said it was like getting a long letter from me. (I suspect that’s not a good thing at all, from a novel-writing point of view.) Knowing my readers was easy for that one, as I was a late middle-aged woman, like so many of my readers, when I wrote it. Also it was about a place I’d lived─ the PNG jungle with an immaculate English-style school in the midst of it─and people I’d taught years ago.

I believe this is a very important key no matter what group you have in mind.
But there is another whole type of novel-writing. Writing for oneself or for God. I think it’s important we don’t lose the joy of writing in our quest to get results. Writing because we love it is so fulfilling. We writers enjoy creating and words are our medium.

Do any of you target a specific group of readers? I’d love to know who they are and how they respond.