Reader vs Writer—M.G. Sondraal
The Reader and Writer have an adversarial contract with any book written. Let me explain.
The first draft is all about the Writer—hammering out the story that is disturbing sleep, interrupting conversations, intruding into family dinners and generally taking over the author’s brain space while daily routine is performed. This is the tale the Writer wants to tell, the book she wants to read, not necessarily the one the Reader wishes to read. That evolves with countless edits, each one expanding the potential readership from one to…more than one.
The Reader has expectations that the story follows narrative norms. For example, in traditional romance and even romantic suspense, girl meets boy, girl hates or loves boy depending on the sub-genre, complications occur, a crisis happens, circumstances shift, girl loves boy and boy loves girl and they finally communicate this to one another. The amount of sex and how explicit those scenes are is determined by the sub-genre. Whether married already, or getting married at the end of the book, happy-ever-after is the promise to the Reader now that the obstacle of false assumptions has been decimated by the “power of love” which conquers all. (Because this is a work of fiction, halting the story here is essential before those underlying poor communication habits, bad financial decisions, irritants from work and exhaustion from young children bubble to the surface and seriously rock the marital bliss boat.)
In crime fiction, a crime is committed, and the culprit identified as the underlying plot. Mostly the criminal is caught. The sub-genre dictates the point-of-view, types of characters, the degree of violence and profanity, and the certainty of conviction. Capers are told from the perspective of the criminal; police procedurals focus on law enforcement with police officers as main characters; cozy mysteries have amateur sleuths solving murders in quiet little neighbourhoods and justice prevails every time; thrillers are wide-ranging and violent and, in these, the criminal can escape.
Knowing the sub-genre well and following the guideline is important. The Writer cannot have a baker as the private detective in a hard-boiled plot, nor include recipes for quiche and a punny title, and expect there’s a large readership out there just waiting for this weird hybrid sub-genre to emerge. There isn’t one.
Whether writing hard-boiled or legal detective mysteries, locked-door or whodunit puzzlers, or international espionage thrillers, the Writer, if she wants to find an audience for her work, has to provide the basic deliverables of the sub-genre while still producing an engaging story. Too familiar and the work is branded derivative and formulaic; too different and the readership is low because the expectations weren’t met, or, worse, there are no readers because there’s no publishing house that will touch it.
Some may argue that deviations from expectation is more a problem for marketing. It is all that, but, as a Reader, I, too, have been disappointed by published works that have failed to satisfy. Sometimes it simply is too cookie-cutter and not sufficiently intriguing for me to ignore the obvious formula behind the plot. I like the unusual. Conversely, there are times when unbelievable plot deviations pull me out of the story. (I am particularly sensitive to the medical science being inaccurate as I’m sure police are to procedural errors.) Readers are very knowledgeable about legions of subjects, so the Writer has to get it right, or close enough it won’t matter to the Reader. Rarely, the story is so convoluted, bizarre, and difficult to follow that I give myself permission to simply stop reading it, life being too short at my age to waste on unenjoyable elective activities, especially since my to-be-read library is extensive.
Each of these scenarios is a contractual failure for everyone. The expected deliverables to the Reader were not provided by the Writer. The Reader is understandably upset, not getting the product they wanted. The Writer is disappointed that, by meeting most of those contracted items, the Reader still wouldn’t move with them into fresh territory. Finding that balance is tricky to appease both Writer and Reader and, doing it with subsequent novels where Reader expectations are well-articulated, approaching impossible. It is, however, what we as writers aim to do every time.
I admit that as I venture more into writing myself, I have become more discerning in my reading, identifying places where more clarity is needed, where the language was too vague, where the clues too obvious. Equally, I am more in awe of a well-turned phrase and intricate plot than I was before I fell into this quagmire of endless re-writes. In many ways, writing has ruined my simple enjoyment of reading purely for pleasure, a loss for sure, but one I’m willing to bear for the pursuit of improved craftmanship to provide those deliverables to readers.
M. G. Sondraal