When I first started calling myself a writing instructor, shared my thoughts on the topic in black and white, I was convinced every writer I’d ever met—in a workshop, at grad school, out there in social media land—would see me for the fraud I feared myself to be.
Sure, I had the fancy graduate degree. Ran a writers’ workshop. I’d spent years writing personal essay and memoir. I’d made my share of mistakes and learned from them, which left me writing reasonably well.
But I fully expected to be called out. In public. Questioned about my thin publication history, my lack of literary awards, the fact that I’d never interned at Simon & Schuster. I hadn’t paid my dues. I was a grandiose upstart, delusional enough to think she could pass Go and collect $200.
Who wouldn’t want to shoot that down?
So I wrote defensively. Did my best to sound erudite. Over-researched everything, gathered supporting evidence for every opinion, quoted luminaries like my life depended on it. Basically, I droned on and bored everyone to tears.
My audience, however, didn’t give a tinker’s damn about narrative arc, narrative voice, narrative anything, which was what I felt compelled to expound upon. You should have seen my graphs? No, my people wanted to know which story idea to pursue. Which tense to use. How to make the stuff on the page not suck—because that’s what they were struggling with. My insecurities were only getting in their way.
I tell you this because, unless you’re in academia, you’re probably not writing a book for your peers either. You’re writing for a target audience with a real problem and a burning desire for a solution. That person just wants someone they can trust to tell them what to do—not someone out to impress them with their breadth of knowledge.
Which brings me to a parenting expert I once worked with. (A composite, which is an easy thing to create because these fears are incredibly common in this industry. The parenting world is rough!)
Good lord, this woman had the goods in spades. The alphabet soup behind her name, the impressive resume, the formal research history. She’s a total nerd about brain science. She taught the stuff to grad students and presented before her peers, and, well, you get the picture. A highly credentialed pro.
But she chose to write for a “civilian” audience—overwhelmed parents who were worried that their kid’s 24/7 screen habit was eating the family alive.
This civilian audience was nothing like her peers. They’re far less interested in the research and the scientific findings, because that’s not their schtick. They’re not into the hippocampus, or the amygdala, or any of the other brain parts—though they’re no doubt familiar with the terms. Sure, they’d sit through a scientific tutorial if it got to a point. But the details? That’s grad-student catnip, not parent catnip. Remember, this is a parent reading at 9 p.m. after a long day and a fresh round of guff from a kid.
Needless to say these science-laden bits were up for discussion during our editing sessions. More than once.
Here’s what trips up almost all of us, me included: we go through a phase where we write to our peers instead of our actual reader. It happens most in prescriptive nonfiction, where we’re trying to establish credibility, to be seen as the leading expert in our niche. Which is scary stuff. We’re stepping onto a platform and declaring ourselves worthy of an audience. That feels a lot like painting a great big target on our backs—especially if we plan to say anything polarizing.
Because peers know their stuff. Some of them will go looking for the hole in your argument, the weakness, the missing credential. There are people who’ll stick your citations under a microscope hunting for anomalies. Bring anything that could discredit you out in public, all innocent like.
Why? Who can say. I’ve got my theories, but they’re not particularly generous, so why go there.
So check your research, sure. But resist the urge to armor it onto the page. Writing to your peers—proving to them that you know your stuff—is a form of defense. It’s also a misread of what civilians actually find useful. Most of them aren’t after that level of detail, and when you put it in front of them, they close the book. They figure it wasn’t written for them. It was written for the academic, the intellectual, the person who already speaks the language.
And that’s the reader who needed you most.
Maybe I should also add that, not long after I began putting myself out there as an expert, publicly sharing my thoughts on writing, promoting my writers’ workshops, which is what I was doing at the time, I got a DM from a chart-topping author. She wanted to know if I could give her a job.
