The Short Answer is I Don’t

How do you write what people actually want to read?

View all responses

My writing is an acquired taste. 

Most of my readers are older women. When they die off, my husband will be my only reader. He reads everything but doesn’t like everything. He’s anti-haiku and gets exasperated with my occasional extreme run-on sentence stream of consciousness posts. He often says he especially likes the posts he’s in which is no surprise because I always talk about him in the most complimentary way. 

For instance, I’m not writing about the fairly surprising fact that he went to have coffee with a friend in the same sweats and sweatshirt he wore yesterday (and maybe the day before). This from a man who used to wear three-piece suits with ties carefully curated the night before. That notwithstanding, my husband is my most loyal reader so I have to be careful not to offend him.

To answer the prompt, I don’t know what people want to read. I only know what I want to write. And what I write appeals to a pretty small band of folks. I have a fair number of followers on this blog (about 5,000) but way less actual readers (maybe a hundred on any given day). I watch the stats, but I don’t care much about them anymore. If one person reads and likes what I’ve written, I’m good.

There have been a couple of my pieces that have hit a nerve and gotten a very wide readership. The one I’m most proud of was about reconciliation after family estrangement. Entitled “The Power of Saying You’re Sorry,” the essay ran in Newsweek magazine on September 5th, 2008. A friend from Alabama later sent me the transcript of a sermon at his church that used my essay as its base. Hundreds of people sent me emails describing their own family’s estrangement and appreciating the story of my family’s reconciliation.

Pretty rewarding, but it didn’t start a career. It’s been said that I didn’t exploit the opportunity – you know, the one afforded by being in the issue of Newsweek with Sarah Palin on the cover holding a rifle over her shoulder (and maybe looking at Russia the same time).

Oh well. I bump along with my little self, writing about death and children and aging and homeless people and Herc and Tempest and dogs I’ve loved that died on me and not having a clue about what people actually want to read.