Inspired By Someone Who Doesn’t Exist
In response to Dancing Elephants prompt #9 of 52
You might think, from the photo above, that this story is about being inspired by art. No. It’s about being inspired for my art — the art of the written word. By someone who doesn’t even exist.
I’m currently taking a class to help writers develop a larger reach, across multiple platforms. I was inspired to take the class by a question a friend asked, which led to me clarifying what I meant by reach. I wasn’t looking for a meaningless increase in follower numbers. I was looking for being able to connect effectively with people I could help.
The first few weeks of class were about the sorts of things you’d expect. Learning to write tweets. Learning the difference between a good article on LinkedIn and a good article on Medium. Creating sustainable writing habits to publish multiple times a week (or even multiple times a day, for Twitter!) without it taking over your life.
Then, in week 3, the instructor gave us an exercise to create iconic audience members. By that time, she reasoned, we’d had enough engagement with our readers to be able to create sample audience members. Who were we writing for?
Meet Alison
The first audience member I imagined was Alison. A woman in her mid-50s from suburban New York, she was the most like me. Unlike me, she wasn’t corporate or technical. She had a position of responsibility in a large organization, a non-profit or NGO. That position gave her pride, both for doing a good job, and doing good in the world. She needed to find something meaningful to do after she and her husband retired. It was going to be travel, especially to third-world countries, where she could maybe find a new way of contributing. But with Covid and inflation, that no longer seems viable.
Alison’s challenge is that she wants a way to bring in some extra money while still feeling good about herself and her positive contribution to the world. She values family, honesty, hard work, spirituality, and self-determination.
How can I help Alison? I can be a living example, radiating confidence and enthusiasm while I work to make a positive contribution to the world. I can build a community of like-minded people to take on efforts that will change the world for the better, and value her unique contributions to those efforts. (I can’t say more about what those efforts will be at this time, but rest assured, they’ll be everything Alison dreams of and more.)
Meet Bruce
My second audience member was Bruce. (Yes, I gave them names starting with A, B, and C. I save my imagination for important things.) Bruce is a technical professional in Silicon Valley. He loved the excitement and adrenaline rush of being part of a successful startup, but maintaining existing code isn’t as interesting or compelling. He’s looking for something new.
Bruce is vaguely dissatisfied with his life. Thanks to his stock options in his successful startup, he doesn’t have to worry about money. In his mid-30s, he no longer thinks blowing off steam with video games, or indulging in trips to Coachella or Burning Man are enough. He sees friends he used to make fun of for being boring, now devoted to their families, and sees his “minimalist” lifestyle is also an empty one.
He’d love to find a new project to work on, that doesn’t just disrupt for disruption’s sake or make money for money’s sake, but that actually makes the world better. He’d like to find a girl, get married, and have kids. But he only knows equally driven software engineers with no interest in “settling down”, or women who want to trade their beauty for his money. He values success, excellence, innovation, and impact.
How can I help Bruce? By building a community around my passion project of moving the world to a post-scarcity framework. With the heavy reliance on automation and digitization, there will be plenty of ways for a software engineer to contribute. Plus, in such a community, he’s likely to be able to find the girl of his dreams. Since that’s still at a very early stage, in the meantime I can talk more about my relationship with my husband, and how we’ve jointly dedicated our lives to this vision. That may inspire Bruce that he can find a similarly meaningful relationship for himself.
Meet Claire
Claire is the youngest of the three, in her early 20s, and working a dead-end retail job to pay off her crushing student debt. The degree in art history has proved useless in “the real world”, but she dreams of one day being able to open her own art gallery. She and her friends enjoy visiting art shows — and not just for the free food (which is usually awful, but at least it’s free).
She reads inspirational, aspirational books, like Eat, Pray, Love. She borrows them from the library or buys them at the thrift store. The apartment she shares is beautifully decorated with thrift store finds, because she has an amazing eye for color and harmony.
Claire tries to be a positive, upbeat person, but sometimes it’s just so hard! She feels like there’s never enough money. She’s trapped in a constant grind from which she can never escape, or even get a little bit ahead. There must be more!
My heart aches for Claire. She is filled with such bright potential, and the world wants to grind her into gray insignificance. It’s for her that I make sure every article I write has a positive ending. That one sparkle of light may be enough to brighten her dreary day. And I can inspire her with my vision of a post-scarcity society, where she will be able to devote herself to expressing her passion for art. She will be valued not for her contributions to some distant CEO’s bottom line, but for how she elevates the life experience of those around her. Claire will be a freakin’ hero.
Conclusion
Having met the three icons of my audience, you can see why I’d be inspired by them. They are all such wonderful people, and they need my help. Especially Claire. Alison and Bruce may be able to muddle through on their own — they’ve both been fairly successful by the world’s standards so far. But Claire needs me. If I fail to write…I’m failing Claire.
I refuse to fail her.
C’mon, Claire. Let’s build the future you deserve, one word, and one act of light at a time.
This is a response to the prompt by Dr. Gabriella Korosi:
These members of the Dancing Elephants Press community also shared their inspiration.
Dr. Preeti Singh wrote about being inspired by a poor man who was himself inspired by the beauty of birds. You don’t have to have much to make others’ lives better, just an open and giving heart.
Allisonn Church wrote of how she was inspired by yoga. Literally. Her meditations give her images and phrases that she writes down in a journal, then turns into poems. Beautiful poems. Dare I say it, inspiring poems. Plus, resources if she’s inspired you (like me) to try yoga.
GnanVi_Speaks shared inspiring nature photos, as well as the inspirational messages she drew from them. What inspired me was that, living in truly awful conditions, she was still able to look for and find inspiration.
Read all of my responses (so far) to the Dancing Elephants Press 52 weekly writing prompts: