Author: robinriback

Reach Your Target Audience

Translate complex ideas into simple language

Successful writers translate complex ideas into simple language for a specific audience. For a sharp “writer’s brain,” our mental muscles must flex like spandex after Christmas dinner. Let’s strengthen our synapses and stretch our creativity.

Reach your target audience — Part 1

In this exercise we will get to know our reader. To effectively describe a complicated topic, we must understand the audience and the environment in which they lived so that we can speak their language.

Our specific reader: Sir Isaac Newton

Narrated by the Voice in My Head:

So listen up!

The loose lipped narrator in my head is a lifelong companion. When we were nine months old, she was responsible for the confusion when I pointed up to the bulb and said, “light” which stunned my parents who weren’t privy to our daily speech lessons.

After years of yammering at me, my inner voice has a new calling. Now, she spreads her love of grammar and syntax.

Escape from Overplanit!

Crash landing

Attention loyal subjects and predicates! I am Lord and Creator of a huge planet that destroys goals and slays deadlines. Look! An alien outline shimmers in the distance. Climb in the rocket, my captive readers! Zip into your orange jumpsuit, snap on an airtight helmet, and stash your timelines in the square mental locker above your face.

How we measure our years

Shakespeare

“Beware, the ides of March,” Shakespeare’s soothsayer cautioned Julius Caesar in 44BC. He compared past tainted March fifteenths to help the emperor navigate a way forward. But Caesar didn’t care! He wanted to live an ordinary day where could soak in the baths, host a lavish dinner party, vomit, and repeat. He was warned but he paused just briefly and then went about his business, saying in his own ancient way, “Whatevs.” Caesar had no respect for this marker of time.

Dreams are my mistress.

I cheat nightly. Like clockwork, I break with Day at dusk. She turns gloomy, fades dark, then disappears over the horizon to lead her solar life in a bright sphere, far from me. Our lifestyle suits us — she pursues other interests; I am free to frolic in my frontiers.

As my eyeballs ping across lowered lids, I begin my affair by grabbing the thick rope nailed to my sill and I hurl into ink-black void. My feet flail over this morning’s missteps as my distended torso twists toward buried memories, resurrecting to yank my ankles.

In The Beginning.

In the beginning
I took a small step
and joined Medium
which expanded my view
of creative writing
in this universe.

On those first days
my meager articles
lived in a great void.
I heard only crickets
loud as locusts,
Chirp-chirp silence, chirp-chirp silence.

And, on the seventh day
I was blasted with the canon:
Wisdom is the key to Medium’s kingdom.
And so it had been written
in my first-born article,…

“Where your fear is, there is your task,” Carl Jung.

THE RETURN: March 2018

Rusty door hinges squawked as Chloe Masters tiptoed into her childhood home. Through the dimness, she saw black mold crawling the walls and flies swarming appliances made decades before the digital revolution.

Back in third grade, she scampered in this room to find her mother sitting on the couch, waxy and slack jawed. A bug buzzed in her shimmering eye.

She shuddered.

A diva shares her secrets.

I was a washed-up diva until I snagged a part in a one-way video interview! This memoir includes my five Diva Tips plus three encore suggestions to help you conquer your next employment conversation.

A diva gets cast. I was a washed-up diva until I snagged a part in a one-way video interview! This memoir includes my five Diva Tips plus three encore suggestions to help you conquer your next employment conversation…

Explore 6 writing stages to nurture your narrative from start to publication.

I live near you on writer’s block in a frightening neighborhood where pride begets fear when we finish a project. I’m a former member of the marauding Empty Page Gang. I menaced myself with the battle cry, I can’t write! But, after the recent birth of my memoir, I banish blank space and forsake my old ways.

You too can become a better prose parent by understanding the six developmental stages of writing,…

A tragic opera in 3 acts.

Overture – On our planet in a living room.

During that first week of pandemic lockdown, I plopped in my chair, snack bits in my hair, the TV cranked to blare. As I flicked cheese dust from my shirt,…