A Writer’s Field Of Dreams

If You Build It Wrong They Probably Won’t Come

One of the most iconic scenes from the movie Field Of Dreams is when Ray Kinsella played by Kevin Costner, hears a mysterious voice whispering to him from his cornfield:

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME

I seriously doubt there is anyone who hasn’t seen the movie at least once, so I don’t think there’s a need to give you a blow-by-blow of how the film turns out. Besides, If you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Although the movie came out thirty-one years ago, folks.

Anyway, going on the oft chance you may have been living in a cave and you're just now getting an internet connection, if you haven’t seen it, there’s always Netflix.

I have no clue where the Field Of Dreams analogy came from today. It just kind of stole second base in my thoughts with a stand-up slide. Frankly speaking, today is really no different than any other day I let my brain roam free to think about what I’d like to write.

Sometimes I hit an in-play dink over third base for a double and some times I fan out at the plate.

But I started wondering about what, as writers, we all do, all the hard work we perform to build our loyal base of readers and fans. I started comparing myself to Ray Kinsella, wondering what the results would be if I ended up creating a lousy metaphorical baseball diamond with my writing.

Would the fans come? Would they sit in the stands, eating popcorn and hotdogs as they enjoyed my show? Or one, by one, would they leave and never come back?

Sticking with the baseball metaphors for just a little bit longer (I promise I’ll quit eventually), a player only gets so many turns at-bat and so many times on the field before he/she either shows promise, establishes decent statistics, or gets sent back to the minors.

It’s the same with writers. We can razzle and dazzle all we want with clickbaity headlines. We can even write some of the best leads we’ve ever written.

But if we can’t hold the attention of our readers through the entire piece, or if we fail to make the salient points we promised (or alluded to) at the beginning, we’re going to lose our reader base sure as heck.

Just because you’ve built what you think is a writer’s field of dreams doesn’t mean your fans are going to like the game you’re playing if you’re playing like crap all the time. Hey, they’re paying for a good show. It’s our job as writers to give it to them. If we don’t they may leave the show.

The situation reminds me of a joke I heard many, many years ago.

A couple with an infant were paying for tickets to a movie. The manager stops them and politely says, “folks, hope you enjoy the movie. I’m afraid though if your baby starts crying we’re going to have to ask you to leave. We’ll, of course, give you a full refund.

Halfway through the movie, one of the two parents leans over to speak with the other.

“What do you think of the movie?”

“Dreadful. You?”

“Yeah, the same. Pinch the baby.”

It’s exactly like that with this writing gig of ours. Yes, we write for a plethora of reasons, a lot of times for our own self-gratification. But when it comes to our attempts to reach a broader base of fans other than just ourselves, we need to truly understand our audience. As a writer, we need to focus on writing something that gives our readers the gratification they are looking for. We need to drill down and understand what parts of our writing continuously hold our reader’s attention.

While I’ll not cover it in-depth in this article, Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s recent challenge to the writers on Illumination about metrics and how we should learn to measure our trends in a more entrepreneurial fashion can help us understand what our readers really enjoy.

By analysis, we can tell what worked for us and what didn’t, and when we really do a deep dive into each section of our work we can ultimately see the reasons a piece worked or the reasons why it didn’t.

A writing friend of my Paul Myers recently presented his answer to Dr. Mehmet’s challenge with his own analysis of what writing on Illumination has done for him. I recommend you give him a read.

I plan on doing an in-depth analysis of my own successes or failures at the end of the month as the good doctor suggests. Of course, my statistics are nowhere near Paul’s, but who knows what can happen in a month right?

Now, try not to look at it as each time you sit down to write, you’re literally pimping out your words to all the paying, reading johns. It’s not like that. What’s that? Oh, you weren’t thinking like that; it was just me?

Then forget I said it like that.

Okay, try this. Try understanding that even writing what your readers want to read, in other words, doing the analysis and writing for your readers first, still becomes a win-win situation for both you and the reader.

How so?

They love to read your writing because you’re giving them what they want. You’re giving them what they want because you have to write; you love to write; you’re writing.

See how that works?

Truly a writer’s field of dreams ain’t it?

Thanks So Much For Reading

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