Working with the Reader

When you write a story, you must always keep the reader in mind: how will your words affect the reader and how will they react? Is anything confusing? Is the story consistently interesting? Will they sympathize with the main character? Will this event cause the reader to feel tense and worry about the outcome? And so on.

There are two main problems:

First, the reader is usually a person you've never met (if your book is published). You don't know if they'll understand a certain word, get your metaphor, or understand what you're describing without more explanation.

Second, no matter how clearly you write something, some readers out there will misunderstand it or won't like it. Writing clearly enough that no one can misunderstand the information being conveyed is an important goal, but it's also ultimately an impossible one.

While critique groups can be useful in pointing out elements of your story that are causing problems for the majority of your readers, critiques need to be taken carefully or the life will be drained from your writing or make it feel unnatural.

One bit of advice I've heard from several published writers is to write for a specific person--someone you know--who is in your target audience. You know them, so you know how much explanation they would need to understand what's going on. You know what would make them like the characters and what would lose their interest. This also makes the book feel more personal to all your readers (or so I'm told). It sounds like good advice to me. Then again, I've always written my novels with a specific reader in mind so I might be biased. ;)