AUDIENCE

As Georg Christoph Lichtenberg himself says, “It is almost impossible to write anything good without imagining someone, or a certain group of people, whom one is addressing. In 999 cases out of a thousand it at any rate greatly facilitates the execution.” [GCL, L.76]

Why, then, one might reasonably ask, would anyone write a kid’s version of his book without deciding beforehand who the audience was?

I don’t know, maybe I was thinking I’d write it first (ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS) and then decide who it was written for? Does that sound good?

::sigh::

The real reason? My actual impulse was to write a smaller version of Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy to make it accessible to adults who didn’t want to read 184 pages. The “kid’s” version got laminated on top of that.

But here I am with a book called Lichtenbergianism for Kids. Time to make decisions about whose hands I think it should end up in.

If you’re just joining us here at the worldwide headquarters for Lichtenbergianism, you may not know that for the majority of my 38-year career as an educator, I was a library media specialist, both at the high school and the elementary levels. This career gives me a leg up on this decision.

For example, I know I could run my text through the readability analyzer over at Lexile.com and see if I’ve simplified it enough for a younger audience. However, there are other factors at play. For one thing, the Lexile score will tell me only that readers within a certain reading range would be comfortable reading the book — but my experience tells me that a kid who’s really interested in a topic will read above their reading level, and I think that’s an important part of my audience, the kid who really really really wants to know about how to MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT.

Also, an audience of 10–14-year-olds is developmentally more interested in ‘how-to’ books rather than theory. They’re suckers for step-by-step books like Ed Emberley’s wonderful drawing lessons or origami books. But a chapter on RITUAL? <yawn emoji>

A little higher on the age range, maybe 12–16, and they begin to be interested in the ‘how/why’ bits. They’re finding out all kinds of things about being human then, including their own creative impulses which heretofore have simply been part of childhood: coloring books, chorus or church choir, that kind of thing.

Now they’re beginning to realize that their creative lives will not be readily accommodated by their school or by the outside world, and they’re looking for excuses (for lack of a better word) to keep going on their own.

This, I think, is my audience: basically high school (14–18) with a lower extension into really diehard middle school artists. (That would have been me. This is all about paving a path for little me: my whole career as a media specialist was spent building a collection that a young me would have wallowed in. [I am pleased to report that it seems to have worked; not a week goes by that I don’t hear from a former student whose life was impacted by the media center.] This book is no different.)

So nearly three years after I started working on Lichtenbergianism for Kids, I finally think I know who I’m writing for.

Good talk. Now get back out there and knock ‘em dead.