In a recent New Yorker cartoon by Alex Fraga, a man wearing a complete beekeeper’s protective suit has just given his wife a gift-wrapped hive of bees. She says, “Really, Paul? Another ‘gift’ that’s just something you wanted?”
I wish such self-centered gift-giving ended in childhood, but I have seen full-grown adults do it many times. Instead of thinking about what the recipient wants, they transfer their own desires onto that person. The subtext is worse than no gift at all.
Writers do this, too. They write only for their own purposes—to polish an ego or push an opinion—thinking of themselves, not their audiences. It’s a formula for failure.
The first thing to know about writing is that no one has to read what you write. Maybe you can force your wife to open that box of bees, but she won’t be interested for long.
Gustave Flaubert obsessed over every word, sometimes spending an entire day pondering how they fit in a few sentences. Every word must work in the machine of your piece. Why? Because otherwise, that may be the word upon which the reader abandons you.
This is the fear that should drive you as a writer. Is this the sentence where they’ll turn away? Because the odds are not good. Hardly anyone reads most of what is written in this world. About 12,000 books are published every day in the U.S. How many of those do you read?
The best writing comes with that feeling you get at a dinner party or in a bar, when you wind up to tell a story that you know your companions are going to love. The worst comes like an 8 a.m. lecture, force feeding information because you’re supposed to ingest it before barfing it up on a test.
The starting point, for me, is the contract with the reader made in the opening lines of an essay, or the opening pages of a book. With those lines, I make a promise. With the tone I strike and the humor I use. With foreshadowing of interesting topics. And with pacing and all the other subtle markers of enjoyable reading.
A good opening tells a reader not only what the piece is about, but how it will feel to read it. Remember, readers don’t care at all what you want to tell them or how you want them to behave. They want to know if you are going to entertain and inform them, or waste their time.
I once interviewed a woman who reviewed a prodigious number of books for NPR. I asked how she could read so many books. The answer: she didn’t. She’d learned to put them down any book as soon as she stopped enjoying it.
This lesson is the most important I can teach my clients. It comes before you start writing the book, before you outline it, when you are just pondering whether you should write it at all. You must decide, for whom are you writing? For yourself, or for your readers?