🎨 Your Challenge, Should You Choose to Accept it ...
Share a piece of writing with a friend or family member.
Choose a scene (or a full short story) where you have a clear idea of the effect you'd like the piece to have. Would you like it to cause the reader to think? To laugh? To feel a specific emotion?
Ask the reader to tell you about their reading experience. You may want to ask them specifically where they found the piece funny and where they saw more opportunity for laughter, if you're going for humor. Or, you may want to know what their experience is when you don't tell them what you're going for with the piece. If you want to create laughter and instead their curiosity is on full alert as they read, you might realize you want to take the scene in a new direction. Maybe you want to magnify the potential to make someone curious, or maybe you want to add more humor into the scene.
No matter what, stay open to what your reader tells you. Often, the feeling we think we communicate with our words on the page, and the feeling a reader experiences, are quite different. That's why it's so helpful to see our writing through someone else's eyes—to see what's going as we planned, where the surprises are. Remember, whether you make changes or not is entirely up to you. The point is to have more information so you can make the best possible choices as you revise.