The Anguish of Trying To Know What Your Readers Want

The mistakes and discoveries you make along the way

When you’re starting out your career as an online writer or a blogger, you will hear many people say that one key is trying to find your niche. A niche is very important because it gives you focus. When you write something, you know that it would be for a targeted set of readers.

But trying to find that niche in itself is never easy.

How narrow would you scale down your topics? Or how wide can you possibly reach? When you try to widen your market, you risk not being focused on writing. However, when you narrow it too much, you will only be writing to very few people who would be interested in your posts. Can you possibly make a living doing that?

As you try to experiment on this, you experience many mistakes along the way.

You do this and you do that, you try to fit in but you fail. You try to be relevant to people but no one cares. And the truth is that rejection hurts.

Perhaps this is why many writers don’t think about these things anymore. They write only about topics that come from within, things they authentically want to express. For isn’t this where most writers began? From that insatiable desire to let something from within come out and turn into words. Words that can somehow represent what one has experienced up-close.

Then if by chance someone else is able to relate with that, then you find more fulfillment. When more people do so, you become more motivated in perfecting your craft.

But what if you have struggled writing for so long and you haven’t heard a good feedback from people?

What if only a few people get to read your posts and they don’t even like what you wrote?

Sometimes the writer gets tired and quits. One returns into writing in one’s journal, locking that diary so that no one else would see. Because it is never easy to reveal one’s heart and be ignored.

I must admit that I have thought about that many times. However, I return again and again into opening that lock and risking my heart all over again. Why? Because only by risking can one possibly achieve one’s dreams. And only by becoming vulnerable can you let other people in.

If you don’t let other people in, you fail to grow. If you fail to connect, you also lose something very important within you that urges you to write in the first place.

I think that a writer’s true wealth is one’s heart.

A heart that can become sad, disheartened and afraid. But a heart that can also heal, move on and try again. Because after everything is said and done, that heart is made to love. And to love means to risk even dying so you can have the fullness of life.

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” — William Faulkner