In a post on Writer Unboxed, Cathy Yardley offers advice for designing your work for a good reader experience, without writing to formula or chasing markets. While “designing” may sound sterile and soulless, it truly isn’t,” she says. “Any prewriting you do, any noodling of plot, daydreaming of character and setting, any imagined snippets of dialogue, any draft or revision… it’s all contributing to the design of your story and how the reader receives it.”
Yardley suggests four steps to designing a stronger reader experience:
- Know your target audience intimately. Knowing your readers’ likes and dislikes can help you avoid pitfalls, identify new angles, and reinvent “dealbreakers.” Identify what you love about your genre and what you find boring.
- Define what experience you’re trying to accomplish. Even within genres, readers have different expectations. Ask yourself: how do you want the reader to feel? For whom are you writing?
- Use your reader’s expectations to delight and surprise while satisfying the reader experience. When you understand your readers’ expectations, you can lead them one direction while laying the groundwork for a surprise twist. You can still bring your reader to a satisfactory ending, but create a mystery about how you’re going to pull it off.
- Prototype, test, troubleshoot. Yardley recommends engaging beta readers and critique partners in your genre. “They’ll let you know if it worked or not,” she says. “Look at what you were trying to accomplish and ask if it worked.”
Importantly, Yardley says this doesn’t mean you have to write to please a focus group. “It does mean looking at what you love and what you do well, then looking at the audience that exists for it, and writing your heart out for them specifically,” she says. “Once you’ve got that clearly in mind, you’ll be amazed at how well you genuinely, organically connect and build your readership – and how your fiction grows stronger and richer as a result.”
