Office Hours

Confidence and the imaginary reader

Got some very wonderful news here - thank you so much, to the Library of Congress and Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, for this honor.

In other news…I had a beautiful drive from Corralitos back to Los Angeles and even stopped by Steinbeck’s house in Salinas:

As usual, he wasn’t home, ha ha, but I’ll keep trying. (This is the house he grew up in, by the way, and the plaque says he wrote several of his early works, including Tortilla Flats, inside.)

I wanted to respond to a request made by Joan Mickelson in the Comments to Sunday’s post, as follows:

Mr. Saunders, if you haven’t published on Story Club, the essay you published in the Guardian on Oct. 15, 2022, I suggest others read it as well or that you post it on Story Club. I read it for the first time today and was floored. It is a perfect answer to many of the questions posed by both Keegan’s story and the podcast and reflects what you said in this post. It also answers a question I wanted to ask you about how to describe a character’s changes in a story. So, thank you for your additional teaching.

Here’s a link to that piece: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/15/could-i-understand-the-people-who-rushed-into-the-capitol-george-saunders-on-how-stories-teach-empathy

And thanks, Joan. 

Also, a discussion I had with Deborah Treisman on The New Yorker podcast, about the story “So Late in the Day,” by the remarkable Claire Keegan, is here.

Next Sunday, behind the paywall, I think I’ll post an exercise we can all try together, that will serve to get us ready for some Tolstoy the following week. 

And now, for our question:

Q.

First of all, thanks for Story Club, your generous advice and supportive presence. Oh man, I’ve learned so much already.

I have a question regarding the imagined reader, the one we aim to meet halfway. We all envision her during the writing process, but she is not fixed, nor merely a reflection of our own preferences, it seems. So, who exactly is she?

I started out as a singer and whenever I performed on stage, there were tangible signs of how my work was being received. I could feel it through the audience's gaze, the silence, or their engagement. If I paid attention, I had a reliable blueprint to understand what my audience liked or disliked and could respond accordingly. However, when I released my first novel last year (yay, by the way), I was surprised by the lack of response. Friends and family had kind words to say, but the most substantial feedback came from literary critics, and it wasn't always positive. At that point, it became easy to confuse the singular experience of a critic with the overall opinion of a readership. Now, it feels like I have lost touch with my imagined reader, as if I cannot hear her clearly anymore.

During your early days, before receiving love letters from fans (or so I assume), you must have gotten some harsh reviews. Did they shape the image of the reader you envisioned going forward? And do the criticisms you received throughout your career still linger in your mind when you write? (Hey George, remember what critic #5 said about your tendency to over-explain? You might be doing it again.) Or do the imagined reader and the literary critic have little to no overlap?

I've noticed that when my partner, who is usually the first to hear about my new ideas, fails to engage with his usual enthusiasm (on a bad day perhaps), it affects me. Suddenly, the imagined reader takes on a specific face, influencing the way I approach the revision process. ("If the character resonated with people, my partner would have smiled authentically or even asked questions. It's probably just a bad idea.”) 

I guess we all yearn for our own little focus group readily available, but when that's not possible, how do we reconcile it all within ourselves? I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on imagined readers, critics, and the external factors that shape our creative process.

Thank you for your time and insights.

A.

And thank you, for this important question, and congratulations on your novel.

This question of the imagined reader is a big one, of course.  I want to try to answer as simply and honestly as I can, with my usual, eternal, caveat: This is how it is for me. 

Just to recap:

What I always say, re this “Who is your imagined reader?” question, is that my audience is me – if I hadn’t read the thing a thousand times before. 

That is: if I just picked up the page off a bus bench and started reading, what would my reaction be?  Would I like it?  Would I keep going?  If not – why not?  And, importantly: where would I start to lose interest or react against the text?

So, the imaginary reader is me with the slate wiped clean – no record of what I thought about the text yesterday, or all the research I’ve done, or the many previous waves of revision and correction and rethinking I’ve done, that have cost me so much, and no memory of any previous allegiances to the text or enthusiasm about it.

A hard state to get into, but we can get into it, and we can get better at getting into it.

In a sense, then, we’re imitating that imaginary reader by assuming she’s a lot like us, at our best – as smart, as curious, as critical, as quick on the uptake, as well-read, and so on.

If we read our text and get a feeling that, at a certain place, it’s dull, or condescending (or whatever), we might also, simultaneously, get a quick flash of what to do about that.

For me (as I’ve written here before) these flash-insights, that come before there’s been any rational thought, are the most valuable ones.

I’ve found this to be a powerful editing approach. It’s simple. We just read, and feel, and react.

The question is always: “What do I think? What do I really think?”

Even if we just cut a couple of extraneous words, we’re in the process of pleasing ourselves (and our imaginary reader) a little better.

For example, let’s say we come across this sentence in our in-progress manuscript:

There was, out there on the county road, a stretch of highway that always struck me as reminding me of Italy. 

That displeases me. I scan it and can feel a more efficient version underneath (as I’m sure all of you can):

That stretch of road always reminded me of Italy.

Better yet:

That stretch of road reminded me of Italy.

And once I’ve got it like that, I find myself asking “Which stretch of road, precisely?” and “Why does it remind you of Italy, exactly?”

Maybe it’s already been established, what stretch of road we’re on, and I can leave that phrase out: 

I turned left on 309.  Suddenly, all was Italy. 

If I list what I find so Italian about that stretch of road, the text is going to improve, by its increased specificity:

I turned left on 309.  Suddenly, Capri came to mind: Trevor’s place, the slightly browning pairs of palm trees on either side of the clay-red drive, that flash of blue-bright pool where I knew I might expect, once again, to see Nan.  But no: this was not Capri, but Fresno.  No Trevor, no Nan.

Well, that not great.  But the “correction” – the urge to make myself like it more, on the next re-read – did, at least, bring out the beginnings of a more specific fictional world. (And even the fact that I can say “that’s not great” indicates that part of me is still looking for a better way through that sentence).

And that’s revising.

But notice: we haven’t really been thinking about any “imaginary reader” – we’ve just been focusing on us, on our immediate, visceral reaction to the sentence.

The skills we want to develop (again, in my model, which does not have to be your model) are: learning to read our own text without attachment; learning to have a fresh reaction to what we’ve written; learning to respond to that reaction with some exploratory, spontaneous adjustment to the text, no matter how small. 

In this mode, becoming a good reviser of our own work is a matter of getting better at detecting those small flickers of Like and Dislike that are always playing across our minds as we read, whether we’re reading our text or someone else’s.

In a sense, to pick up on your musical example, dear questioner, we learn to be both performer and audience.  We are looking within ourselves for those “tangible signs of how (the) work is being received.”  (Are we delighting ourselves or not? If not, why will anyone else be delighted?)

If we’re not delighting ourselves – that best, most demanding and beauty-receptive, version of ourselves, that is – how might we begin to?

Even a single better word is an improvement in that direction.

But there’s a deeper, scarier issue embedded in the question.

What happens if we do all of that, and what we like turns out not to be what they like?

That is: what happens if that internal meter telling us what’s good and bad goes, or seems to go (per the reaction of the outside world), out of calibration?

We’ve all had the experience of following the advice above to the letter (reading and re-reading and re-reading our text, changing it over and over, until it sings and thrills us, hooray) and still having our story flop.  By whatever metric of “success” that we’ve consented to (trying to get it published, hoping to win a prize, offering it up in workshop, wanting to have it be adored by friends or family)….it doesn’t get the reaction we’d hoped.

This can be a real heartbreaker and, worse than that, as you mentioned, it can mess with one’s editorial confidence.

An analogy: someone says: “Of this group of people, pick out the person who, it seems to you, is the most honest.”  You’re allowed to do a series of interviews with the candidates over an intense two-day period, you hang out with each of them, maybe even get to spy on them when they don’t know you’re listening (this is starting to sound like a bad reality show)…then you choose. 

And that person turns out to be big liar.

Then the producers say: “O.K., try it again.”

Your confidence has gone down, not up.  Suddenly, you’re doubting yourself.  You used your skills…and they, apparently, were lacking. 

This is how we may feel when a work that we’ve labored over and come to love gets a non-friendly assessment out in the world.

This happens, of course, all the time – to everyone.  Even if a work gets published, and a lot of people like it, well, some people won’t, and, as you mentioned, this can get into your head. 

I’ve been writing a long time and have had the privilege of being widely reviewed (and, these days, that is really a privilege) and yes: I can still remember a few that really landed hard, and hurt very much at the time. (I still stage imaginary arguments in my head with those critics. And: I always win!)

And when a bad review has come in, or a series of them, I’ve had just the reaction you describe – I suddenly wasn’t sure who I was writing for, or what was good, in prose.  (I remember when I got my first negative review, I cleaned our basement for two straight days. I just didn’t want to face the world.)

A few of these bad reviews turned out to be helpful.  (Someone said, long ago, “Saunders writes better out of love than anger,” and that has stayed with me, and has helped me very much.) 

Others just seemed wrong, or personal, and those passed more easily (eventually). 

I think the trick is to open yourself up to reviews, if you can, in the hopes that something will stick – that you’ll be able to hear it. Just open yourself up. What’s transient will pass; what sticks will do so because it is essentially corroborating something you already know, and hearing it from that other source can change things for the better.

But sometimes it just hurts.

I heard a great writer say once that one way to approach a review (any review, positive or negative) is to read it the way you would a student paper.  Is it well-written?  Fair?  Does it make sense? Does it develop its argument?  Certain sloppy or offhanded reviews – whether they’re positive or negative — if approached in this way, lose their sting (whether that sting is cruel or, you know, positive and inflationary, because hyperbolic).

To be honest, when a book of mine comes out, I’m always just hoping that there’ll be enough positive reviews to outweigh/drown out the negative ones and let me go back to work feeling that my assessing mind is still basically reliable. 

But there are always moments, after two or three rough reviews (negative or “meh”) in a row come in, when that basic confidence flees.  And this seems completely natural. We do this highly subjective thing and then a big voice comes in from afar, in some authoritative font, and it doesn’t like what we’ve done….and doubt creeps in. Of course it does.

It’s like being the captain of a ship and suddenly losing all idea of how navigation works.

And yet, even after some negative reviews, when I sit down and read, say, any two random paragraphs, from different books, I know which one I prefer.

I still know.

And that’s the part of my mind that I’m going to use when I start writing again, because, really, it’s the only one that can be used.

But, yes: for all of us, the confidence that we know what is good and what isn’t waxes and wanes.  And that confidence is vital to what we do.  It’s everything, really.  It may be the main skill: to know, at any time, what we think is good.

I try, from time to time, while writing, to do a sort of an inner scan re my editorial confidence, like, “O.K., we’ve started writing today, self – how are we feeling?  Do we have strong or weak views?  How seriously should we take these edits you’ve begun making?”

The reader has posed such a profound question, and I don’t want to disrespect it with a facile answer.  (It’s one of those questions to which the most responsible answer is, “Wow, right: that’s a hard one, that bears some real scrutiny.”)

But, to restate the question: How do we improve, or refine, our ability to know how our work is going to land on a reader?  And, if that ability goes out of tune, what can we do about it?

This question also speaks to an important and potentially painful truth: Whatever our hopes are for our writing, they might not be fulfilled. 

Not everyone is going to prove capable of writing as well as they’d like to, of writing a story that moves someone.  That’s just a fact of life.  It speaks to the whole issue of differential talent, of luck, of whether a particular writer’s mode of expression happens to intersect with what a reader can receive, or with what the culture is ripe for. 

We might not publish; we might never write a story that satisfies, or thrills, or even interests, our friends.  Our work might get some success, then fade away.  We might labor diligently all our lives, and then find that the culture has abruptly moved away in an unexpected direction, rendering our work irrelevant or mute or quaint.  (I am terrifying myself with this dread-filled litany, yikes, sorry.) 

And even if our work outlives us, it won’t last forever (since nothing does).

So, one obvious answer is to disdain all of it – publication, praise, the approbation of our friends, thoughts of legacy – and just write for the fun of it.  But if I’m being totally honest, part of the fun for me – an essential part of the fun – is the seeking after praise and approbation. It just is. (If I was the last person in the world, living in some cave with my PC, would I keep writing stories?  I wonder.)

So, just writing without any thought of audience doesn’t quite do it for me; it puts me in mind of what Capote said about Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” (I think he was wrong but it’s still a pretty good line. I’m guessing Kerouac had to do some serious basement-cleaning after that one, ha ha.)

To know if something is good, I have to ask, “Is it communicating with anyone?”

What our questioner is asking, I think, is: “And what if I’ve tried to get my work to communicate…if it hasn’t, quite?  What adjustments can I make, and how can I make them?”

What I’d like to do now is open this profound question up for some group reflection.

So:

How do we know if what we’re writing is good? Are there ways to recalibrate our sense of what’s good?  Can we (should we?) write without caring what readers will think (including ourselves?)  Do any of you feel that you can write well while only thinking about it feels in the moment of the writing?

And so on.

P.S. It occurs to me that an earlier post might be apropos here.  “Freakification” is something I try when a given piece of mine seems to be just sitting there – a little too cautious and traditional and lazy.  It is, in other words, what I attempt when, re-reading, I am bored (and feel a prospective reader or critic might feel the same way).