Every writing decision I have ever made, every structural choice, every tonal shift, every decision about what to include and what to cut, has been shaped by one prior question. Who is the specific person I am writing for?
Not a demographic. Not a market segment. A person. Specific enough that I can imagine them reading this sentence, in a particular physical context, at a particular point in their experience of the problem I am trying to help them with. When I was writing Parenting the System, the specific person was a parent sitting at a kitchen table late in the evening, phone in hand, searching for something that explained what was happening to their teenager, and finding nothing that named it precisely enough to be useful. That specificity changed everything about the book.
The Trap of Writing for Everyone
The instinct, when writing non-fiction on a subject you care about deeply, is to make it as comprehensive and inclusive as possible. To not exclude anyone. This instinct produces books that feel simultaneously over-long and strangely insufficient. When you write for everyone, you write for no one in particular, and no one in particular feels particularly seen.
The paradox is that specificity creates universality. The more precisely you write for the particular person with the particular problem in the particular context, the more reliably readers in different contexts recognise their own experience in your words. The specific detail unlocks the universal feeling. This is why the memoir genre works. The writer who names their precise experience often receives letters from people in wildly different circumstances who say: this is exactly it.
“Write for one person with enough precision that they feel found. Everything else follows from that.”
Finding the Reader
My process starts not with research but with the conversations I have already had. What is the sentence someone said to me that made me think: there is a book in this? For High-Functioning Burnout, it was something a training delegate said at the end of a full day's session. She was clearly exhausted and when I asked how she was, she said: 'Fine. I'm always fine. I just can't remember what fine actually felt like.' That sentence is the reader. That experience is the gap. Everything that went into High-Functioning Burnout was written to be useful to that woman, in that moment, with that precise combination of competence and depletion.
What the Reader Needs That They Cannot Always Name
One of the challenges of writing for a specific reader is that the most important thing they need is often not what they would ask for if you surveyed them. People in burnout do not always know they are in burnout. People in dysfunctional systems do not always know the system is the problem. The writer's job is to give them what they need while meeting them where they are.
This requires writing that earns trust quickly, through specificity, through recognition, through the demonstration that you have been in proximity to the experience, before asking the reader to accept a reframe. You cannot lecture people into insight. But you can walk them, sentence by sentence, from where they are to where they need to be, if you have understood, clearly enough, where they are starting from.
The Practical Test
Before I finish a chapter, I run a test. I ask: would the specific person I am writing for, reading this in the specific context I have imagined, feel understood by what I have just written? Not impressed. Not informed. Understood. There is a difference. Understood readers finish the chapter and feel that someone, finally, got it. The second response is the one that produces loyalty, word-of-mouth, and the kind of readership that writes to you. Write to be understood. Everything else follows.
Bart Reevers