Nicolas Cole wrote a memoir about his World of Warcraft obsession in high school, expecting ridicule. Instead, readers connected deeply with it, and a conversation about the game led to a tech entrepreneur who later invested in his company. You can't predict who your writing will reach.
You never know who is reading on the internet. As a high schooler, I was a pro-level World of Warcraft player, hardcore gamer, obsessed with that game. In college, I was really insecure about that. I didn't tell anybody that. I thought that it would be really weird. I thought people would perceive it as super nerdy. You would never tell a girl that. I never talked about it. And then ultimately I realized I actually wanted to write a book about it, which is ironic. And the whole time I was writing this book, it was my first book, it was a memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. The whole time I was writing this book, I was worried that I was going to finish it and put it out into the world and then all these bad things were going was gonna happen. People were gonna ridicule me, they were gonna call me a nerd, I just invented this whole scenario. The complete opposite happened. To this day, I cannot tell you how many people, when they find out and they hear my World of Warcraft story, how many people will quietly say to me, "By the way, I played World of Warcraft too, Horde or Alliance." And actually, fun fact, in my first business, how I ended up connecting with an incredibly successful tech entrepreneur and angel investor who ended up investing in our company was through us talking about World of Warcraft. So my point in telling this story is You have absolutely no idea what is going to resonate with who, which means you are doing yourself a disservice by overthinking everything and thinking, "Oh my gosh, if I write about this thing, well, that's going to ruin my niche, and if I do that, then my whole audience is—" You are overthinking it.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
