I sat down to write this post about the reader I write for. You know the idea. The one imaginary person an author holds in mind at the desk, the face they picture turning the pages, the reader who quietly shapes every sentence.
It’s a beautiful practice. The trouble is, when I went looking for my reader, I couldn’t find just one.
When I first started taking my writing seriously, I had a head full of ideas that refused to sit politely in the same room. A sweeping metaphysical fantasy. A love story about memory and legacy. Historical fiction drawn from thirty years of tracing my own family tree. A literary novel set in a regional river town. They all wanted to be written, and none of them looked anything like each other.
Early on, an author gave me some advice I’ve never forgotten. Pick one genre, I was told, and stay there for at least five books. Build your readership first. Once they trust you, you can slowly morph into something else.
I understand the logic. It’s sound advice, and for many writers it’s exactly right. Readers like to know what they’re getting. But it has never sat comfortably in my body, and I’ve learnt to pay attention when something doesn’t.
Because the truth is, I write what I feel.
I could be deep in a romantasy, building a city brick by emotional brick, and reach a point where I need to step away. So I’ll open a different file and spend some time with Yang Lai and Annie Gillan, my third great grandparents, as they make their way to Australia. A little historical fiction. A change of air. And when I return to Soul City, I’m returning with something fresh in my hands.
For a long time, I wondered whether that made me unfocused. Now I think it’s something else entirely, and I think I know where it comes from.
I’ve worked in communications for nearly thirty years. (Yes, I started when I was two.)
One of my roles was writing the communications and speeches for my CEO. To do that well, I couldn’t write like me. I had to become his voice. I had to learn who he was, how he spoke, the rhythm of his sentences, the words he would reach for and the ones he would never say. The goal was for no one to notice the writing at all. They should only hear him.
Then he left, and a new CEO walked in.
It felt like the right time to change things up and refresh the way I wrote, because now I had to be someone else. I had to set down a voice I knew by heart and start listening all over again. A new cadence. A new set of instincts. A new person to understand from the inside out.
I didn’t realise it then, but that was some of the best writing training I’ve ever had.
Maybe I don't have one reader. Maybe what I have is one practice: listening for the voice the story needs.
So many of us are told that finding our voice means finding one fixed thing and holding onto it. But my experience has been the opposite. My voice isn’t a single sound. It’s the listening underneath all of them.
When I write Kaelon in The Spark, I’m listening for intensity and protectiveness, for a man who has taken up residence in my head and won’t leave. When I write Sally and Jimmy in Eternal Echoes, I’m listening for something softer, a love so deep it leaves an echo. When I write my ancestors, I’m listening across generations for people I never met but somehow feel I know.
They all sound different. They’re all still me.
The same skill that let me step into the shoes of two very different leaders is the one that lets me move from the streets of the Soul City to a ship bound for a new country, sometimes in the same week. It isn’t a lack of focus. It’s range, and range is something I’ve spent most of my working life building, one borrowed voice at a time.
So here’s where I’ve landed. I don’t write for one imaginary reader. I write for the feeling that pulls me into a story and won’t let go. And if you’ve followed me from one world into another, I suspect that feeling is exactly what you came for too.
