Keep one specific person in mind when you write – Herbert Lui
I don’t mean a persona. I mean a real person with a first name and last name. Ideally, you’ve met them and spent some time talking with them. If you haven’t, maybe you can attend one of their speeches at a conference or find an interview online somewhere. If you can’t spend time with this person or their work, then you need to find somebody else.
If you don’t know who that person is yet, you need to do some research. Find someone to represent the people you are trying to serve. If you are writing a book for people who want help with self-promotion, find somebody who needs help with self-promotion. If you are writing for a person working for a company as a network engineer, find them.
Here’s an example of how this looks: when Brie Wolfson writes or edits something, she keeps Stewart Brand in mind. Stewart was the co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. She imagines being across a table from Stewart, are his eyes going to twinkle from reading the work? Or will he fall asleep reading it?
Author Michelle Kuo says in an interview with me, “There’s something about writing a letter that allows you to discover your conversational voice, which also means your forms of speech, your idioms, your little jokes. Sometimes, it also allows the voice to be funnier, to be self deprecating, and to desire actual connection. When a person knows who their exact audience is, it gives them more consistency, so they’re not switching between different potential targets. When you’re consistent, then the reader trusts you. An outside reader trusts you.”
