Let’s talk about TV for a moment.
There are lots of shows out there. Since Netflix, most off-air shows are available at the touch of a button (still waiting on The Waltons, Netflix – get on it!).
Even if you screen out all the stuff that came out yesterday, there’s still so much coming out. You’d never be able to watch everything even if you tried. Even if you pulled it off, you’d go into overload and not have enough energy or time to reflect on what you saw.
Now take TV, and add Books, Blogs, Magazines, Music, Education courses. If you’re anything like me, you could major in about 20 different subjects if money and time weren’t an issue.
But money and time ARE an issue.
So you filter it all out. If something doesn’t apply to you and your situation – you’re not going to pay attention to. You don’t have time for anything else.
Yet you are aren’t likely to find anything put together for your exact situation.
As a consumer, you have to take what applies mostly to you, and run with it.
As a producer, you aren’t going to write a self-help book for a young, professional Asian American in west L.A. trying to date a Christian recording studio engineer in his late 30’s. See what I mean? If you wrote that book, and it actually reached that one person, you’ve spent $1000-$3000+ and made back $15.
What’s a producer to do?
How do you create something that a large group of people will buy, enjoy, and share with their friends, without your hard work getting ignored by everyone?
Here are a few things you can look for:
- All people have universal needs, fears, and desires
- All people have underlying motivations for their desires
- All people have social pressures pushing them this way and that
- All people have different experiences, results, and feedback from their actions, and varying levels of awareness about why they are in their current situation
These apply to everyone. Yet they won’t be the same for every person out there.
- The woman who wants to be beautiful in order to get a career as a model will have a different underlining motivation than another woman who just loves running after work.
- An elderly person who desires security want a gun in their home in case an intruder breaks in and attacks them. That same person, if they grew up in a bad neighborhood on the outskirts of town, may instead prefer renting an apartment next door to a police station.
- The high school student, pushed into a medical degree by their parents, will have different motivations than another graduate who reads books on anatomy and physiology for fun.
If you’re writing for the woman who wants to be a model, you will use the type of words she uses. You’ll illustrate what it will look like when she is on the cover of Marie Claire, and how eating green vegetables will make her skin glow.
The student pushed into studying medicine will appreciate guides on how to get through the tough courses with as little effort and time as possible. You’ll talk about how proud their family will be, and show how they can do whatever they really want on the side, while they use their medical career to finance their dream life.
Or you’ll go the other way and write a book that helps him tell his parents to ‘eat their shorts’.
When you know you WHO are writing to, you’ll know
- What you’re main character will look like (even nonfiction books have characters)
- How they talk
- What they dream about
- What they are afraid of
- What questions they will ask on each step of the journey
By then, you may even know what makes them laugh!
By getting specific, the people who you are writing to will feel like you are writing TO them. At the same time, you won’t be vague. You’ll cut through the clutter. And your work will get the attention it so richly deserves.