Treat Yourself as Your Audience
That’s how you make your best work
“You know, people that give me advice, I reckon they’re talking to themselves,” Rust Cohle says in “True Detective”.
I have come to realize that Rust is very, very right. In watching “Mad Men,” I realized what made so many advertising presentations so effective is that creative copywriters and directors advertised a product and sold it to themselves. I also realized that the most compelling self-help advice tends to be people who are trying to give self-help advice to themselves, and really buying into it.
As such, the big takeaway is that in writing, whatever message you’re trying to send, whatever point you’re trying to make, thing you’re trying to sell, the person you have to inform, persuade, or move is yourself.
If you don’t find yourself moved by your own writing, in writing it or in re-reading it, chances are that your readers aren’t going to find themselves moved very much either.
I don’t mean to get too meta, but writing is not compelling unless you can find your personal meaning in it. It has to be relevant to you, or else why is something worth engaging in reading? Why is it worth writing?
Writing is a form of processing, well, life. I would like to say I became a better writer through reading a…
