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Writing for Yourself and Your Audience · The Daily Writer

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Writer, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for creative success.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to be yourself?
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: From the time we're kids, our parents and our teachers told us to be ourselves.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that is great advice to be sure.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's especially important in your writing where it's critical to develop your own unique voice.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It can be confusing when you're trying to build your writing career because you gotta fit into a category.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't write for ourselves, we also write for an audience.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Readers expect our writing to fit certain pre-existing categories.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: They also expect that a book will fit certain conventions as far as page count, length, and divisions into chapters and so forth.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you balance between those two things, your unique voice and the expectations of your readers?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, this is a good place to learn from other creative fields.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Musicians have a unique voice and they write unique songs, but they also fit into an overall genre, whether it's pop, rock, country, jazz, or something else.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they also use the same 12 notes that all Western music has used for a very long time.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Actors face a similar situation.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: They need to speak the lines in a script, but their delivery, their body language, and interpretation is their own.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: The expectations our readers have of us are not a limitation, but rather they're a sandbox that we can play in.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sandbox where we can develop endless variations on our voice and the themes that we write about.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: The author Rita May Brown said, the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you but yourself.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's important to not just like yourself, but to love yourself, your voice, your uniqueness, your one-of-a-kind contribution to the world.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But when you can accept the limits of the literary sandbox and give your readers something new and fresh while also meeting and exceeding their expectations, well, they will love you as well.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailywriterlife.com.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.