AUDIENCE

On days like today, when I have no current project that’s interesting enough to write about, I have to punt. For Monday’s post, e.g., I did it by posting the flash fiction rom-com that I slammed together for Backstreet Writers (on Tuesday, so a late punt at that).

Today, I have to punt again. If you go to the home page and scroll down, you’ll see a “word cloud” made up of the ‘tags’ I use on the posts. The larger the word, the more posts on that topic. One strategy I use for this kind of occasion is to check that cloud and look for words that are smaller and beef up one of those Precepts or concepts by adding another post with that tag.

So.

AUDIENCE

As one of our quotes from Georg Christoph Lichtenberg says:

It is almost impossible to write anything good without imagining someone, or a certain group of people, whom one is addressing. In 999 cases out of a thousand it at any rate greatly facilitates the execution. — G.C. Lichtenberg, Notebook L.76

And as the great Prof. Peter Schickele always said:

Truth is just truth, you can’t have opinions about truth.

AUDIENCE: WHO IS IT FOR? What should they see?

AUDIENCE has been foremost in my mind as I work through the BugVerse Chronicles, mainly because there are two audiences to consider: the young person who more than likely is not a reader, and the older person reading it to them. (Yes, a couple of my test readers were already proficient readers, but they’re the upper end of that bell curve.)

For the young reader, Bug has to be relatable, and I think I’ve made the character as toddler-like as I can. Bug is curious, optimistic, a little bit oblivious to any dangers. Bug goes from page to page, exploring, commenting, and moving on. (Bug is also a simple enough drawing to be easily replicated by a young reader.)

Bug’s encounters are designed to reinforce ideas and situations the young reader has probably already encountered — colors, spiders, dog poop (!) — and they are encouraged to comment on those ideas and situations, especially on the final, blank page, where they are asked to continue/complete Bug’s story. Also, I’ve kept the vocabulary simple so that beginning readers will see a lot of words they might already know. No sesquipedalianism here!

(My knowledge of this particular AUDIENCE comes not only from my own experiences as a parent but as an elementary educator, a library media specialist, for the last half of my career. We media specialists are trained and certified in instructional strategies and educational psychology K-12, and so a lot of my design of the BugVerse springs from that training and that experience connecting young readers to their reading.)

For the adult AUDIENCE, I have tried to make the books entertaining both by including sly jokes that a child might not catch and by having the adult directly engage the young reader in discussion about Bug’s choices in each book. (There is an adult reader’s guide on the BugVerse page for each book.)

Time will tell, of course, but so far the reaction to the first three BugVerse books has been very positive, from adult readers, from parental readers, and from kids themselves, so I am cautiously hopeful that I have been successful in creating a BugVerse that entertains and engages.

NEXT: A Bug’s Friend!