3 Tricks to Connecting with Your Reader

One of the biggest compliments for a writer/author is when a reader says, "I can relate to this" or "I was/am in the same position." Writing is a means of connecting with people and to impact them should be the ultimate goal. This happened to me recently with Secrets in the Wind.

A 16-year-old picked up my latest novel and upon reading the first chapter, said, "I cannot believe it! I was telling my parents the exact same thing, that we need to visit our homeland because I may get too busy soon, with college prep." This female 11th-grader was not Bengali like the protagonist in Secrets in the Wind, but she was in the same age group, had grown up in America and faced similar challenges in school.

Here are three steps to relating to your audience like this:

1.Be aware of this: You're not only discovering yourself through your writing and opening up yourself to a world full of strangers as well as familiars, but also, you are letting someone, somewhere, know that they are not alone in their journey/experiences. Someone, somewhere, needs to read your work so go for it.

2.You should explore what kind of audience you are writing your work for and that includes as generally as knowing your audience's age group, gender and/or culture, to more specifically, their favorite season of the year or even their taste in food.

3.What is it that you wish for your audience to learn from having trekked through the smooth, bumpy and/or winding roads of the letters and punctuation in your written text? Ask yourself this and once you find an answer, the story should fall into place and lead the reader to that goal.

However, in the above three steps, remember not to lose your voice in your written work. As crucial as it is to analyze who your target audience is, it is equally significant to remember that you should not keep guessing what your reader wants to read throughout the writing process; rather, you should write what you, yourself, would like to read over and over again (because that's what you are going to be doing throughout the editing process).

Happy Writing!