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comicreliefmorlock · 3 years

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A Reader’s Guide to Writing: Lesson #1

Squinting at the title? Wondering if I wrote that incorrectly?

Nope!

Look, everyone is hoping for the Constant Reader that Stephen “Horror Daddy” King talks about. Everyone wants their own Constant Reader when they sit down to put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard.) And quite often... They have no idea what their Constant Reader is going to think of their efforts.

Well.

I am not just a Constant Reader. I’m probably the Constant Reader. I read, without exaggeration, a book a day on average. (I’m legitimately not kidding. No, I’m not a speed reader. {Deliberately, anyway.} No, I’m not paid to read. If I was, trust me, I’d be typing this on a way better computer.) And I read basically everything.

Yes, there are a lot of books I haven’t read! And there are a lot of books that I have.

So, budding writers and anxious wordsmiths, let someone who is 80% Reader/20% Writer tell you what actually matters to your readers. Not to the publishing industry (who wouldn’t exist if not for people like me) or to the editors who have to polish your rough draft.

I’m going to tell you what matters to me, the reader.

Lesson #1: Is your book fun and easy to read?

No, I’m not talking about writing comedy. You don’t have to write comedy. You don’t have to throw out all the tension, make everything light-hearted and fluffy. But what you do need to do is find out if someone enjoyed reading it.

And I don’t mean in a technical, structural way. I mean did your reader sit down and realize they were struggling to parse what your sentences even meant? Were they stuck staring at blocks of description that you, the Author, thought provided a fantastic description but meant nothing to them?

Here’s one of my favorite sentences which is both fun to read (there’s no struggle, no difficulty in processing it) and easy.

“He sat on the sidewalk and held on tightly to the rolled-up umbrella, and wondered whether going south to London was really a good idea.” (’Neverwhere’ by Neil Gaiman)

Look, this sentence is pretty basic. There’s absolutely nothing fancy going on here. And that? That is one of the best things about it. You can immediately get a clear mental image of a man sitting on a sidewalk curb looking both dejected and baffled, clutching an umbrella with an increasingly tight grip. (See how I used a lot more words to describe what that ONE sentence brought to MY head?)

Your readers have an imagination. That’s why they like reading. Readers really love being able to come up with a mental image as the words come along. What makes reading slower? Is when the author insists on giving you intricate, sense-by-sense details that they’re using to basically beat the damn image into your head whether it suits what you like or not.

Know why so many people (at large) think reading The Classics is a trial? Because the use of language in many of The Classics requires a modern reader to sit down and forcibly parse out what the Author is trying to say. While some of these stories are really good and they can be thoroughly enjoyable to read, I can’t say that a book like ‘Dracula’ counts as a fun, easy read.

Here’s an example from a book I’ve never been able to make myself read, but which I know the story (thank you Vincent Price for making it palatable) to. And this? This is not fun to read. This is certainly not EASY to read.

“There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable edifice. In the front gable, under the impending brow of the second story, and contiguous to the street, was a shop-door, divided horizontally in the midst, and with a window for its upper segment...” (’House of the Seven Gables’ - Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Now maybe you do want to write something that will be considered A Classic one day.

Don’t write like this to do so.

A Classic is, in fact, important to literary study because it reflects the culture, time and class in which it was written and by which it was influenced. Trying to write as if you have a thesaurus taped to your face is honestly going to sound very alien to the modern reader.

Your Classic isn’t the Classic of the 1800s; it’s something else entirely, so don’t break yourself to try and write like Poe or Hawthorne in the hopes of getting a reader’s respect.

When a Reader picks up a book, we want to be entertained or informed, depending on what we’ve grabbed (fiction vs. non-fiction.) We want a break from our lives, a little distraction, something else that isn’t going to remove us FROM the story and make us realize that we’re a 30+ year old woman sitting in a convoluted manner on a battered armchair with a cold cup of coffee that maybe needs refreshing... and okay the laundry needs to be done...

A story that uses archaic language, forces too much information on the reader at once (blocks of untagged dialogue, masses of description, tedious exposition) is going to pull the reader OUT of the story. Because it’s not fun. It’s not easy to read.

Probably one of the most important questions an Author can ask a Reader is “So where did you get bored?” This will tell you where the story stopped being FUN. Where it stopped being EASY.

You’re not asking “okay did that scene with the dog make you put it down and walk away” or “did the part with the mother make you cry?” because if the emotions were triggered, trust me, your Reader will TELL YOU. What you, the Author, want to know is where reading the story stopped being a fun, easy thing to do and became a labor.

The books and authors that have become cherished parts of my brain partially earned their places there by being Fun and Easy to Read.

Lesson #2: Do I give a fuck about your characters? up next!

#A Reader's Guide to Writing #Books are life #Reading is life #And sometimes I think writers need to know about readers!

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