Interpretations

by G.Parker

So.  My life has been one of interpretations all week.  For example:  Reading an add to buy 2 of something get 1 free and interpreting it in my brain to buy 1 get 1.  Sigh.

It's all in the interpretation.  How your brain reads it.  Did you ever notice how men and women's brains seem to be wired differently like that?  I saw a cartoon a while ago showing a man and a woman driving in a car with one of those freeway signs showing length of time to a destination.  The woman is asking the man, "So, when I see that, I'm thinking how long it's going to take to get there.  When you see that time you think..."  the man answers "I can get there faster."

It's easy to generalize or group the human condition in relation to gender.  The whole men are from Mars bit is not that far fetched.  However, it doesn't just stop there; there are teenagers, young adults, twenty somethings, thirty something, and so on.  When a writer is looking at targeting a specific group, they need to make sure what their audience is looking at and how things are going to be viewed or interpreted.

Books that I read when I was in elementary school are still being read, but generally by the younger grades.  Stuff I would have read in high school kids are reading in junior high and some in 6th grade.  It's a little frightening when you think of some of the content, coupled with the knowledge that some librarians are actually recommending them to young readers -- but that's another subject.

If you were to write a story about a young girl on a farm with a runt pig, adult readers are probably not going to be interested.  If you write about a woman who remembers back to when she was a child and lived on a farm and an amazing summer that had left an imprint on her, you'd have women readers.  If you were to write about a girl on a farm with a big where there's a big mystery or killing or buried treasure, you'd have the male population.  Get the idea?  It's all in how to turn the story to the audience you want to write for.

Having a great story idea is only great if you target the right reader.  If you are into writing romance, don't be thinking you're going to get a lot of male readers.  (Bruce Willis in the movie RED isn't your normal man.)  I know of several authors who have picked a pen name that won't identify them as female because it's been shown that the majority of men will not read a woman writer.  Go figure.

So if you are still in the exploratory stage of where you want to go with your story, think of the audience you want to target and figure out how they're going to interpret it.  It's all in the words, dude.