Writing: Pandering to the Reader

 May I admit a bit of self-centeredness? How I got over my feelings of inferiority about my writing was to decide to write what I wanted to read. It worked enough to get me back to fiction, to trying to live up to expectations of the few friends I had not driven away. In On Writing by Stephen King, he talks about having an ideal reader. It is a good idea, but one where I have found a good criticism in Understanding the Reader Without Pandering to the Reader:

I’m going to start with the last part of that tweet. In recent years, I’ve noticed a shift away from talking about “the reader” in creative writing classes for some good reasons. Namely, many authors and critics with marginalized identities have rightly pointed out the way that creative writing classes can pressure writers to shape their work toward a very specific audience. Basically, well-off straight white people with a Western understanding of story structure. Students might be told to make a book less queer or more exoticized or in countless other ways to make their work less personal and more formulaic for this assumed audience.

That is one way to pander to the reader. And one sure to give us less interesting and more flattened works of art.

Another way to pander to the reader is to write towards your worst reader, fearfully trying to anticipate every bad faith reading and hedge off any possible offense. This makes for watered-down, anemic work. And it doesn’t work anyway. Someone somewhere will take offense no matter what you do.

When I say you should understand “the reader,” I don’t mean any specific audience. Nor do I mean the most bad faith reader eager to ding you on Goodreads and cancel you on Twitter. I also don’t mean your “ideal reader” or best reader, the one who will give you the benefit of the doubt on everything. What I mean is simply another mind which is not your mind. A mind that knows nothing except the words in the order they appear on the page.

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To try and sum this up, the point is just that as writers we should try as much as we can to experience the text as another reader would. As just a text. Only the words on the page in the order they appear on the page. Ask yourself if the information in the right order for the reader to understand what you want them to understand? Are the important elements emphasized? Is the reader being directed toward the things you want to direct them to? 

Much to think about, especially as I am revising "Love Stinks." 

sch 10/12/22