Get Started Right Writing Task: 002

For this second ever Get Started Right Writing Task, identify your target audience. If you're trying to get published, your chances of publication (and gaining sales) should increase if you have an idea about who your audience is. As an editor, I receive submissions that are targeted to WD, but then, I also receive submissions that are not (and quality of writing has nothing to do with those rejections, just poor targeting). So take a few minutes this week to really think about who your target audience is.

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When I wrote my first poem as a teenager, I had a target audience of one person: a girl I was trying to impress in high school. As such, that poem came out white hot with a very specific goal: to show how I was overcome with teenage crush emotion.

But then, I kept writing, and eventually my target audience turned into my high school friends, with whom I shared my poems in composition notebooks and eventually a little self-published fanzine called Faulty Mindbomb. And the writing just flowed and flowed and flowed into my college years, where I would try to impress fellow workshop writers and creative writing professors.

And then eventually, I burned myself out. My writing (mostly) went into a multi-year hibernation period. Like a dormant volcano, I would still have little eruptions here and there, but it was not a consistent flow at all. Until a few personal events turned the writing back on...and knock on the wood, the writing has stayed on since.

So about my target audience?

For a while, my target became literary journals and poetry publications. I would read them and try to write poems I thought they might publish. Sometimes they would; often, of course, I received rejections. But eventually, I published enough poems that I had enough to get a poetry collection together, and the process of publishing and promoting a book was fun, but it also felt a little empty.

So for years now, I've been writing for an audience of one again: myself this time.

I do hope to once again publish many poems and collect another book or three, but instead of thinking of what might impress faceless literary editors, I've been focused on trying to write poems that would impress me as a reader. What are poems that I (especially the hungry young version of myself) would read and think, I want to hear more from this guy. And so that's who I've been writing for.

Maybe I'll look back in 10 years and think, I should've been writing for the editors and critics instead; but something deep inside me thinks I won't. Something deep inside me thinks writing for myself, with everything I've learned and am still learning, is the ticket to my best (and most authentic) writing, whether anyone reads it or not.