Getting to Know Your Readers Day Three: Knowing What You Want to Achieve

When Drew Houston first created DropBox, it became one of the most expensive tech failures of its time. Steve Jobs famously waved it away as mere trash. Then one day Houston received some odd advice: Define what you’re doing. That’s it. That’s all they suggested, so that’s exactly what Drew Houston did—he defined the cloud he had just invented and put it into a simple, doodle-driven explainer video.

Then he became a billionaire, and the cloud became one of the most important innovations of its era. Jobs wanted to buy it then, but Drew had more billions to earn, so he said, ‘’No, thanks.’’

Knowing what you’re trying to do is one of the most powerful ways to succeed, even in writing.

There are hundreds of perfectly valid goals to shoot for in your readers. Maybe you want to show them a new kind of love. Maybe you want to evoke anger. Maybe you just want to immerse them in an extraordinary scene. Maybe you want them to experience the movement of a river, just with words instead of a raft.

You’re allowed to have all these goals, but like Drew Houston, you’ll do a lot better if you know what you’re trying to achieve. What do you want your reader to feel, see, or think when they read a piece of work?

When I was still new to writing, my mentor explained that a piece could be intellectually obscure and emotionally clear simultaneously. You could make a reader feel something even if they couldn’t grasp what they were reading on an intellectual level.

This thrilled me. The very idea of it sounded like magic, so I went home and tried to achieve exactly that. I wanted to make my readers feel something even though the work was intellectually obscure. Any goal is valid provided your readers find it useful, valid, or affecting.

We’re here in this workshop to find out the latter: whether your readers find your work useful, valid, or affecting.

But first, know what you’re trying to achieve in your readers.