It's Getting to Know Your Readers Week! (With a Comedy Twist)

If you use this workshop as it is intended, your readers’ experience of your work will be one of the most powerful tools you’ll ever use. A piece can’t come alive unless it reaches your readers. What we do, as writers, is try to connect. That’s the most important goal of writing, but nobody starts out with a sense of their readers’ thoughts. We must learn this by listening to them.

Feedback is a rare beast in the writing scene. It’s treasured and cherished, but it also requires a lot of work and time. For that reason, you’ll struggle to find people willing to give you an objective view of your work. This is something we all have to earn, often by giving back in exactly the same way.

A single reader can give you a completely objective, universal view, so half the work is finding as much feedback as you can manage. When you have several voices giving opinions, it’s far easier to work out who is right about what. This is one of the reasons I post something on Fetlife every day: Not necessarily to be read, but to learn what writing works for this site's users. This habit has helped me to hone my writing and gain a better view into my readers’ heads. It has literally increased my earning power.

Fetlife is unique in that it has a core group of strong, critical readers. Few people know this, but it’s my writing workshop, and maybe it can be yours, too.

Not all readers are good readers, though, so how do you know if your critics are right? Do you even need readers? Isn’t writing enough? Where do you go when you’re unsure about a piece? What do you have to gain from giving feedback? These are the questions we’ll be asking this week. Since there are no exercises for this theme, I will be posting some writing prompts at the end of each post. This week, I want to focus on some fun writing, so I’m going to give you titles from comedy and satire sites. Once you’ve written and posted your piece, I will show you the original.

Don’t assume comedy writing is easy, though. If you do it well, you will exercise the same muscles you use to write poetry. It’s an intriguing genre, and you never know. You might love it.

Here are today’s prompts:

A Letter You Can Give to Your Children in Twenty Years Explaining That You Don’t Have Photos or Videos of Them as Babies Because You Couldn’t Figure Out How to Handle Your Phone’s Storage
Things People Have Yelled Down to Me, a Person Trapped Alone at the Bottom of a Well

Simple, Not Contradictory Rules to Motherhood

Lesser-Known Goals f Project 2025
Terrifying Warnings for the Gurgle-Goo Sleepytime Baby Swing