Fluid Imaginalphabet: I is for Ideal Reader
I don’t know who you are.
I can look at my Google Analytics to get a rough understanding of where you are, where you came from, and how long you stayed on Fluid Imagination, but who you are — your motivation for coming here and the goals you hope to achieve — these I can only imagine.
Ideally, you are a fiction writer, and you’re interested in reading medium-sized chunks of writing advice. Ideally, you’re also a human being, with all the icky bits that come from being human, the same icky bits that make you laugh at poop jokes and cry at funerals and prefer common words over jargon.
As a member of my ideal readership, you’re neither male nor female, black nor white nor yellow nor red nor blue nor indigo or violet. What you are, instead, is someone who gets turned on, turned off, and rubbed both the wrong and right ways.
You enjoy television (good television), movies that make you think and feel, and books that either dare to try something new or succeed in doing the same-old same-old really, really well.
But more than anything, as a member of my ideal readership, you are fiercely curious about the craft of creative writing. You don’t want a magical formula. You want, instead, to work hard and sweat. You want to sit at the keyboard and, as the man said, “open a vein.”
You’re here because you want to write words until you find the phrasing that makes you cry at the truth of it. You want authenticity, earnestness, and syntactic acrobatics.
In short, you’re here on Fluid Imagination because you are my ideal reader. Where else would you be?
