I don’t mean a persona. I mean a real person with a first name and last name. Ideally, you’ve met them and spent some time talking with them. If you haven’t, maybe you can attend one of their speeches at a conference or find an interview online somewhere. If you can’t spend time with this person or their work, then you need to find somebody else.

If you don’t know who that person is yet, you need to do some research. Find someone to represent the people you are trying to serve. If you are writing a book for people who want help with self-promotion, find somebody who needs help with self-promotion. If you are writing for a person working for a company as a network engineer, find them.

Here’s an example of how this looks: when Brie Wolfson writes or edits something, she keeps Stewart Brand in mind. Stewart was the co-founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. She imagines being across a table from Stewart, are his eyes going to twinkle from reading the work? Or will he fall asleep reading it? 

Author Michelle Kuo says in an interview with me, “There’s something about writing a letter that allows you to discover your conversational voice, which also means your forms of speech, your idioms, your little jokes. Sometimes, it also allows the voice to be funnier, to be self deprecating, and to desire actual connection. When a person knows who their exact audience is, it gives them more consistency, so they’re not switching between different potential targets. When you’re consistent, then the reader trusts you. An outside reader trusts you.”

Flip this advice and you get something helpful as well: make sure your writing doesn’t get watered down into something that’s written for nobody in particular, or something that could have been written by anyone. 

Whenever a draft is turning out like that—and it happens!—put it on the shelf until you can figure out who you are writing it for, as well as what something is that only you could say about it. 

P.S., If you are writing for a business, Respondent is a helpful tool to find people. You can describe a person’s job titles and skills, and Respondent will put the listing out to their network of people. People will apply to do an interview with you. You can ask questions and record the conversation. Even a surface-level, 30 minute, conversation with someone real will give you a real sense of what and how they think.

P.P.S., Also, you may be doing research already without knowing it. Pay extra attention to the conversations you are having and the emails or messages you are sending people. One of the more popular posts at this blog emerged from a conversation I had with a friend, who happens to be a software engineer. I don’t think it’s a small coincidence that it resonated with other software engineers at Hacker News.

P.P.P.S., This reminds me of a post about someone who built an app for themselves and their girlfriend, and this comment.