Some writers claim never to think of their readers – I attended a talk once where a young writer whose work I found to be rather dull said they weren’t interested in the reader. Who were they to assume what a reader wanted? I found this response both strange and arrogant. And I wondered how much of this was also connected to the dullness of their work. Yes, it’s true that writers must write the book they want to see in the world and in order to create something new they must sometimes imagine they are the only people who have ever told this story before. But that doesn’t put the writer above the reader. Writing to be published is to write for a readership. It’s a privilege and a responsibility and it can’t happen in a vacuum.
Language is a system of exchange between the reader and the writer and as many writers will attest, readers can get very chippy if they feel as if they are being ignored, or bored, or conned or undermined. The history of literature is full of stories of authors being harassed by their readers – think George R Martin being doorstepped for the latest instalment of Game of Thrones; or Conan Doyle when he killed off Sherlock Holmes in The Stand magazine over 20,000 readers cancelled their subscription; or the outcry over James Frey’s Million Little Pieces (where he lied about his drug addiction) having to go on Oprah and apologise. Or think of the millions of fan fiction sites where readers have taken on the mantle of famous characters and developed their stories in their own way. Isn’t this a perfect kind of reading?
To me the best kind of writing provokes readers into thinking about themselves – they map their own experiences onto the work and engage in a relationship with the work – with the ideas, the language, the characters. We often talk about reading provoking empathy – but it’s also because people can also imagine these events happening to them. One of the pleasures of reading from and promoting Radical Attention was the way in which readers wanted to tell me about their own experiences of the perils of life online. The book did as it was intended to do – opened up a space for a conversation.
Often when I’m teaching, I find that students have a very confused idea of their reader. They don’t stop to consider what kind of reader they have internalised as they write. The voices that egg them on or stop them from writing. Sometimes the internal critic can be loud and distorted – a very unhelpful punitive reader – or too kindly, or ambitious, letting them get away with sloppy writing or without considering how stories or language will land. Part of developing good writing is learning to read like a writer, to see how certain tricks and techniques set up expectation or hint at how and why events will play out. It also involves moderating the inner critic and trying to see our work as realistically as possible. See where our work belongs on the shelves, with which other writers and ideas the story is in conversation.
The reader is a collaborator in a good book – they are not simply passive admirers, a fact which my rather dull young writer realised after his book sold poorly and he approached me for teaching work. I wanted to answer him by telling him that good writers are also good, and enthusiastic readers and to be grateful for each and every one. No one owes us their time and attention, it must be earned by being the best writers we know how to be, and some of that means having a proper conversation with our own internalised reader. We’ll be discussing this more on my workshop on the 14th October ‘Who is My Reader?’, you can book a spot here.
Julia Bell is a writer and Reader in Creative Writing at Birkbeck where she is the Course Director of the MA Creative Writing. Her work includes poetry, essays and short stories published in the Paris Review, Times Literary Supplement, The White Review, Mal Journal, Comma Press, and recorded for the BBC. Her most recent book-length essay Radical Attention was published by Peninsula Press. Her poetry collection Hymnal – a memoir in verse – was published by Parthian in April 2023.