Reader Love

We've got a wave in the air

I might come to a conclusion by the end of this article. I will, nevertheless, ask the question: What does my writing do for a reader? Am I a diversion, an educator, an evangelist, an annoyance, or just words on a page? I might be a panderer, providing the reader with what they want: a libidinous frolic with leather restraints and furs, a calming tea after a locked door murder, or a thriller set in Prague with all the trappings. In fact, the line between panderer and artist is a rather incoherent (decoherent?) one, with a reader silently judging the writer’s words and perhaps taking a journey similar to the writers, or dissimilar and just as satisfying or dissatisfying.

Please note: I’m using the indefinite article regarding the word “reader”, not the reader, which sounds generic-y, but a reader, not someone to be pinned down or reduced to formulaic behavior. I realize I never step in the same reader twice.

Perhaps my manuscript will find Golden Horde aficionados, who understand siege tactics, or romance readers who like the idea of St. Thomas the Apostle’s ability to stop trysts from a distance of 1200 years. Perhaps they might be a person who picked a copy out of the trash and are looking for evidence of my constant prose failures. Should I be empathetic to one and all? Surely I can’t have a universal approach to readers, one answer, one algorithmic prompt for a single response.

I recently got to hear novelist Paul Lynch speak at the zeppelin mock-up Gulliver at Dox. Technology, as always, is changing the acts of reading and writing. As the artificial intelligence portion of the aesthetic pie gets larger, Lynch countered that — after hundreds of years — novels are still markedly better than virtual reality. Why? Because the author is able to affect the very heartbeat of a reader.

Add to the gut punch or warm hug of well-chosen words, the tools of the sentence, the paragraph, and the twists and turns of chapters. The sentence structure bone is connected to the breath bone. The breath bone is connected to the autonomic nervous system bone. A reader is on a journey and they might be inflamed by the fight or flight, or feed and breed impulses. Am I on the same wavelength as a reader. My critique group offered two opinions on my latest offering, which has a foray away from plot and causality into setting and detail:

…they saw Abu’s ten-foot continuous stream of fire, and behind it the ranks and files of metals, salts, and solutions lining the walls, the copper alembics, the cooking baths and quenching baths standing on the floor, the benches with glass beakers, shiny milling machines, and sieves and screens.

For me that’s purplish prose, and provoked a “You’re losing me here” response, and conversely, “If a reader has made it this far, they’re along for the ride, and would like to see more.”

I favor a reader who is intellectually curious: “What were the Tudors about?” “How does this melange stuff work?” “What is a three-body problem.” A reader might not be interested in plot as they are in the world in general. When I read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time’s his depiction of someone on the autism spectrum interests me as much as the plot. I never thought I’d be interested in how it feels to be someone coming of age in German-occupied Netherlands, but The Diary of Anne Frank put me on a wavelength of empathy and love with a girl I’d never know.

One of my favorite writers about writing, George Saunders devotes a section of his Substack to reader questions. One particular post on his blog Story Hour keeps coming back to me, because it gets to the very heart of consideration of a reader’s very heart. Readers react differently to the stimuli of the story. But Saunders addresses a universal question when he quotes Dr. Seuss: “Why am I telling you this?’

It’s the stubbornest of questions: how much am I there to assist a reader’s journey, how much am I leading, or how much is the reader following? One ideal would be a liturgical approach, peaking with a kind of communion. Or a yoga session. We all work together on poses affecting similar muscle groups. I’ve been to Grateful Dead concerts, where aided by music, dance, and mind-bending drugs, this communal spirit blurred the line between band and audience. Poetry and prose might look calmer, but can still steal a reader’s face.

At the beginning of A Christmas Carol. Dickens, like a good con man, asks for reader buy in with the very first words, words to the effect of “believe me. I’m the author. I’m your guide. Follow me for a good time.”

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

But then a reader has to believe, or pretend to believe, that Marley is a ghost. It becomes a reader’s creed, and once you get someone to believe the unbelievable you have opened the gates for a reader’s journey.

Or a reader could be the recipient of a more open-ended invitation as in Mary Oliver’s “The Poet Goes to Indiana.”

I’ll tell you a half-dozen things
that happened to me
in Indiana
when I went that far west to teach.
You tell me if it was worth it.

If you find yourselves baffled by a reader, take heart. You are, to paraphrase Prague poet Willie Watson, doing the same work Charles Dickens and Mary Oliver did. Perhaps just follow a grandmother’s advice for most recipes: Make it with lots of love.