Unless you write fiction for the sole purpose of personal fulfillment, you probably hope other people will read your work. When you publish a story, you are setting up a kind of contract between you and your reader. For the investment of the reader’s time and money, you agree to provide a satisfying reading experience. Of course, your definition of “satisfying” may vary, depending on what you like to read, and I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to tell you that as writers, we are communicating. Successful communication requires not just the delivery of a message but also for the recipient to understand the message. Okay, now that I’ve boiled down my expensive college education into one sentence, we can move on. Continue reading “Are You Meeting Your Readers’ Expectations?”
Tag: communication
My Way Or the Highway!
A guest post
by Dick Waters
My way or the highway! You’ve most likely heard that expression, but hopefully you will see that my way is the highway. Have you ever learned from someone else’s mistake? I have, and I’ve also learned from my own. I’m writing this to help at least one person not make the same mistake I did publishing my first novel.
As I write this I think of Route 66; a great road for a scenic drive, but not the one to take to get where you’re going in an expeditious manner. Super highways were built to provide a more direct route. Publishing is experiencing the same scenario – ‘traditional publishing’ versus ‘independent publishing,’ or self publishing. Continue reading “My Way Or the Highway!”
A Failure to Communicate
Everyone knows that readers have subject preferences. Not everyone will like a story even if it is very well written. It is not literary failure if someone doesn’t like your story because they don’t like that kind of story. It is failure if a reader normally likes the kind of story you wrote, but doesn’t like yours. They don’t have a beef with the editing or the grammar or the genre or even the idea of the story—they just did not like what you wrote or the way you wrote it.
Where most writing fails, it does so because the original idea of the story the author wished to convey to the reader gets lost in translation.
Remember that writing is one form of communication. There are four parts to communication in writing: Continue reading “A Failure to Communicate”