Write to One Person Even if You Make Them Up 🤔
The what, why and how of using a Reader Persona to improve your writing
Write for everyone and you speak to no one.
TL;DR
Use a Reader Persona to write to a specific person
Because you move from vague to specific
Specificity increases your focus
Specificity increases reader response
Maximise impact because your readers feel like you know them
Because you've taken the time to actively listen
Use this free (for this week!) Notion template to make it easy
Use this Notion template for:
Defining your ideal reader as we're talking about in this post.
Helps you know who your alpha/beta readers may be
Creating more detailed characters for your fiction (it works!)
Writing your future self, I'm going to try this myself to plan my next 5 years.
Note: This template is available for free in the first week, then pricing ticks up slowly based on interest and downloads. Another experiment which I'll report back on. 🤓
What do these have in common?
Scratch your own itch
Write to your college self
Help you from two years ago
Know your audience
These common pieces of advice, highlight the importance of helping a person you know well. A person who's life and problems you understand.
Step one in the Design Thinking process is to build empathy, get to know the person you're trying to help. Creating a persona distills that acquired empathy into a tangible picture of a person.
Personas are tool to shift focus from money or code to people
In software development, business-minded analysts or code-centric developers often focus too narrowly on their areas of concern. It's what they're good at, the bottom line or the cool new tech. But they can neglect the consumer in the process.
Personas help add more balance and champion the unheard by making them feel more real. It's much more difficult to ignore Betty Saunders, 26, who has a one-eye kitten called Patch, and really wants to book a flight home to see her ailing grandmother.
But a reader reads right?
So, they'll read my book right?
Yes, but they also work, love, play, commute, choose, struggle, fail and die. Once the kids are down and the cleaning is done, the path of least resistance is the one that wins.
Netflix is buttery smooth for that reason.
Twitter is addictive for that reason.
Attention is scare and easily fragmented.
Understanding their journey in detail helps us fit our stories in there somehow.
But better than wedge them in, we can craft stories that light up like a beacon to a certain someone looking for Regency Werewolf Romance or Cyberpunk retellings of Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland.
And hopefully make their journey a little easier and a little more fun.
It's also about understanding how they find us, trust us and then listen to us.
Focus on who you’re trying to help
A reader persona helps us think about this person in detail.
Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they love and hate?
The overriding focus is toward action and behaviour.
What can we act on and how will they act? We focus on elements within their makeup that we can act on and we record what is likely to influence their behaviour.
Love and hate are strong emotions. Along with fear these motivate action.
We pay to get more of what we love, like binge-worthy TV shows or beanie babies. We pay to avoid what we hate, like traffic or waiting in line.
And we certainly pay to reduce fear with private security, insurance or a dystopian disaster story that makes our world feel far more pedestrian.
By thinking of the person in detail you bring them out of your unconscious and onto the page. This will shape what you write, when you choose to speak to that one person.
It makes the abstract and vague, concrete and specific.
You have all the skills you need
If this sounds very familiar it's because as writer's we've done this before.
We make up people for a living and this template will help structure it for action.
I’ve used it to create my own persona for The Reader Experience, the one based on what I imagine (assume) a reader of this newsletter is like and what matters to her.
This is Treya, she's my imagined reader of this newsletter and the kind of writer I'm trying to help each week. My aim is to help her get out of her own way to become the prolific writer she dreams of being.
Build them from what you know
She's female because most of my commenters on here and Medium are women.
My most engaged audience tends to be female. And if look at my favourite literary festival, most of the readers in my country are female too.
Also I tend to like writing strong female characters, I blame my single-parent mother for showing me the strength and power of women. Men I don't really understand.
I've used some of my own itches and frustrations, and I've added in bits from what I've heard writers say on Twitter and on Medium.
Use it for your reader and for your characters
I’ve also used it to create three characters in my new story world Escape Town.
Omni, a young muslim girl from Cape Town. A Tony Stark of the third world.
Murph, a broken hacker who must overcome his self-doubt to be of any use.
Syn, [ redacted - I cannot really say who she is without spoiling the story.]
I found it incredibly helpful for both.
Spoiler warning: Reading those character sheets could spoil a serial I'm working on as part of Jann's Imposter Syndrome challenge.
Keep in mind that you’d empathise different things depending on whether you’re writing a fictional character, a reader of your fiction or a potential customer.
You have a lot of the knowledge
There’s a reason “scratch your own itch” works. If you build a product that solves your own problem you’ll increase your likelihood of success.
It's because you know the problem intimately. It matters to you enough for you to take action. And you know the primary user. It’s you. You can test to see if it solves your problem in a practical and reliable way.
In this way you can build up your persona using elements of yourself.
I’ve done this with Treya. I won’t reveal what parts, but there is enough of me in there to feel a connection with her and to want to help her (or my younger self or the me two years ago unnecessarily bumping his head).
This helps you connect with the, “write to your younger self,” advice. Remember who you were before and use it as back story for your persona. Generalise it a bit to give some distance form yourself.
Otherwise you're talking to yourself, like Murph.
Because we need to balance the above with the UX Law: You’re not your user.
Yes this is contradictory, but the gist is that the people reading or using your products won't be exactly like you. They will have different lives and struggles, skills and resources. They may be a different race, creed, age, gender, class, or any other socio-economic shorthand for stereotypes and nuance.
So keep that in mind. Ask how are they like me and how are they different.
Moving from Assumptions to Data
Assumptions are seldom 100% true.
We're using a controversial shortcut, in UX lingo it’s called a Proto-Persona, a starting point based on personal knowledge. This is problematic because our own confirmation biases can mislead us.
We can seek information that fits what we expect. Deceiving ourselves and ignoring what is could be in front of us. Missing opportunities for greater success.
In writing terms this could be ignoring comments that suggest you’re actually a better romance writer than a sci-fi writer.
Or that your readers really love how you handle social inequality but they could care less about your environmental preaching.
So why bother with this version?
Because it's a place to start, and it allows us to see the benefits sooner. We don't all have a research team with fat budgets. We need to try this and get going.
So this week we'll write a persona based on what we know and feel to be true.
And then next week we’ll dive deeply into how we can gather public information to improve and strengthen our personas.
To listen to what people are saying all around us.
Because Data is Everywhere
Reader data is so easy to find.
We have so much we can pull from its a little silly, it’s far harder where I work in the health information system space. My users are in a different country, speak a different language and don’t post their thoughts online for anyone to copy and paste into Notion (if only!)
But our readers do.
We can find them on Medium, giving direct feedback on your writing or having conversations online via Twitter, LinkedIn or Reddit (Facebook too probably, but I don't have an account anymore so… 🤷♂️ you'll have to tell me about it).
We can learn from the questions they ask on Quora or the reviews they take the time to leave on Goodreads and Amazon.
The trick with all this data is knowing what is useful and actionable.
I'll share more on that next week. For now get started on the template.
Create one for your fiction or your non-fiction. Or use it for a character.
If you run into any trouble or have any questions please use the comments below or you can email me directly.
Next Steps
Start playing with the Persona Template. Have fun, it's meant to be enjoyable.
Next week I’ll do a deep dive into constructing a person and with examples of how I’ve use Treya the Troubled to get ideas for templates or articles in this newsletter.
Personas focus your heart and mind on the person you’re trying to help.
Duplicate this template into your Notion account while its free this week.
Start filling the blanks and bring your questions for next week’s session.
I’ll share an ArtBreeder tutorial for portraits and examples of real data I’ve collected.
One more thing…
Here's a Time-saving Tool Tip:
Type the same things over and over? One of my favourite tools for reducing monkey work like that is Magical Text Expander. It's a free super-simple chrome extension.
I use it to for my Medium Bios, sharing Editing FAQs or Microcosm Write for Us blurbs.
Even the little sign off at the end of these emails. Let me know yours if you try it out.
If you have any questions about the article, template or anything else just ask in the comments. Or pop me an email.
Until next week, happy writing!