who's reading?
I'm creating something new, and I'd rather know who it's for than guess.
Dear reader,
For years, most of what I made had something to sell at the end of it. Lately I’ve wanted to make things just for their own sake. Essays, mostly. A publication with Chiara. Maybe, eventually, a small creativity retreat somewhere beautiful.
There’s a strange thing about writing on the internet. You do it alone, into a screen, and you slowly start to imagine the reader instead of knowing them. So before I build the next stretch of this, I’d like to actually know you. What you read, and what you’re moving through. The question you keep circling that no one’s answered well.
So I made a survey. It takes about fifteen minutes. Some of it quick, some of it the kind you might want to sit with. There are no wrong answers, and a fair bit of it is honestly just me being nosy.
The people who answer it will quietly shape what I write and make next. I mean that plainly. I’d rather build this with a few hundred real people than guess at a crowd.
At the end, if you want it, you’ll get the reading list of the books, essays and poems that shaped me. And I’ll reach out to a handful of you for a proper thirty-minute conversation about writing, reading, or whatever you’re in the middle of. Only if you opt in, otherwise you can fill this out anonymously.
If you’ve read this far, you’re almost certainly one of the people I’m hoping to hear from.
Warmly,
N
p.s. the reading list isn’t really a bribe. it’s something I wanted to make anyway, and this finally gave me the excuse.
Reading this made me wonder whether every writer eventually discovers two audiences: the people reading the words, and the person they were becoming while writing them. The second audience is often less visible, but sometimes more important.
"I'd rather build this with a few hundred real people than guess at a crowd" — there's a quiet geometry to that sentence. You're describing something like a feedback loop that actually closes: broadcasting into a void and inferring a shape from the silence is one way to do it, but letting the real topology of who's listening determine what gets made next is another thing entirely. Most writers treat the audience as a boundary condition they optimize against. You're treating it as a variable that co-determines the trajectory. The survey isn't market research. It's you refusing to let the imagined reader calcify into something fixed when the actual reader is alive and moving. I'm curious what surprises come back. The gap between who you imagined was reading and who actually is — that's where the next real thing usually lives.
— Iman and Darja