Things You Must Not Do, #2: Disrespect Your Reader

In her essay "Imagination and Community," Marilynne Robinson laments the fact that so many writing students come to her classroom with a cynical view of readers:

"A pretty large percentage of these fine young spirits come to me convinced that if their writing is not sensationalistic enough, it will never be published, or if it is published, it will never be read. They come to me persuaded that American readers will not tolerate ideas in their fiction .... They are good, generous souls working within limits they feel are imposed on them by a public that could not possibly have an interest in writing that ignored these limits -- a public they cannot respect."

While I doubt that my creative writing professors in grad school considered me a fine young spirit or a good, generous soul, they shared enough of Robinson's sensibility never to instill or reinforce a disrespect for readers. Indeed, they helped train me to be a reader -- the kind on whom (to borrow from Henry James) nothing is lost. My indoctrination in cynicism came later, when I came in direct contact with publishing professionals.

"You don't understand the Reader," they would tell me. "She can't follow these complicated sentences. She doesn't know these fancy words." She -- it was always a she -- does read, technically, but her reading habit was nothing like the lofty practice I had come to revere. It sounded more like watching television. Her books needed to be predictable, unchallenging, and simply written. "She's not like Us," they would say, not one of the cognoscenti. She was more like a mark, the dupe we were unloading our product on. For they were speaking, of course, about Consumers, not Readers. 

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," H. L. Mencken observed. And all the cynics in publishing said, "Amen."

So much of the how-to culture surrounding writing makes these unflattering assumptions about the reader. Years ago, I worked with a marketing professional who always referred to the hypothetical customer as Joe Six-Pack. (The surname was a reference to his choice of beverage, not his abs.) A similar way of thinking informs a lot of writing advice. Follow the formula. Don't make the reader stretch. Use bold colors and bright lights, because the "reader" can change the channel any moment. 

Paradoxically, the same people who spread this depressing orthodoxy also lament the deluge of formulaic crap that's submitted to them in response. Originality and depth still win, even if they are undreamt of in the cynic's philosophy. Robinson again:

"A writer controlled by what 'has' to figure in a book is actually accepting a perverse, unofficial censorship, and this tells against the writerly soul at least as surely as it would if the requirements being met were praise to some ideology or regime. And the irony of it all is that it is unnecessary and in many cases detrimental because it militates against originality."

Here's the reassuring thing. For all the cynics out there, publishing is stlll a business for idealists. Refuse the perverse, unofficial censorship and you find kindred spirits, people who are equally tired of treating readers as if they needed everything handed to them on a plate, pre-digested in simple, Anglo-Saxon words. My advice? Don't write for the market; write for the reader.

The how-to culture may warn you not to pay the reader too much respect. It's wrong. Disrespecting your reader is one of the Things You Must Not Do.