Who Am I Actually Writing This For?
Everyone who gets serious about writing is taught about the ideal reader. Some instructor quotes Stephen King’s passage in On Writing about his wife, Tabitha, how he writes his scary stories with her in mind. “Someone — I can’t remember who, for the life of me — once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person,” he writers. “As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking ‘I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?’”
It’s a good idea. It’s also rather impossible to work with, sometimes. Because it takes a LOT of effort to imagine that person, if you’re just starting out. It takes getting out of your own head and what you’ve been writing and taking (potentially scary) actions to learn about who might embrace your work.
When I wrote nonfiction, my ideal reader was easy to figure out. I was always writing for someone other than myself; I had important stuff to share, stuff I’d learned and wanted to pass on. Because I was already a member of a certain thought community, with my own research and expertise, I knew my peers. I could imagine who would most benefit from my particular pearls of wisdom, ideas, exercises. From teaching and hanging out with others who taught and wrote about writing, I had a very clear idea of the reader who’d really get what I had to offer.
This research, this maturing of my topic and how I spoke about it, was intrinsic to my work. And most times, I was on target. I got to test my ideas in front of a live audience, when I taught classes. I could sort the responses and adjust my writing accordingly.
Memoir writers have it fairly easy too: they can imagine a reader who struggled through the same changes or traumas.
With fiction, hoo-boy. Totally different.
Recently I read a beautiful response to this question: who is your ideal reader as a fiction writer, and how do you find them? It contains important clues for every genre of writer who is looking for their best audience.
It came from the ever-generous George Saunders on his Substack “Story Club.” A subscriber, a musician, was in the same dilemma as me. She knew her musical audience. She couldn’t figure out her literary one.
George’s response started off with the premise, which I agree with, that we initially write to please ourselves. We become our own first readers. We feel enamored with our work or we despise it; it reaches the place we intended or it falls short. But we are the sole judge, and it’s alive due to the standard we create, consciously or unconsciously.
For me, this standard is interior: a peanut gallery of past teachers, editors, writers I learned from, feared, admired. I might add close friends or family who encourage me. An editor or agent who critiques too.
This comfort bubble of an internal audience holds up well during the writing and revising of most of my fiction. Into this tight circle enter other careful readers—a writing group, writing partners, paid editors and coaches—who have an investment, a compelling reason to stick with the reading.
It took me a long time to find these first readers. I’d been in a dozen writer’s groups, in person and online, before I found the one I feel so privileged to be part of now. I met my writing partner in an online class we both attended and I liked how she saw my writing and responded. What I was looking for, I found: none of these readers are superficial in their comments, they give me the straight stuff, and we have built a community of mutual trust, so vital to preserving the creative spirit. But most of all, they are readers who “get me.”
Why is that, I often wonder? It’s not always the material. If we didn’t have a commitment to respond generously to each other’s work, they might not be interested in the topics I share. As I thought about this, after reading Saunders’s post last week, I realized it’s because I am vulnerable with these readers. I expose myself, my fears and hopes, my core values, what I want to communicate as the deeper meaning of my writing. I share what matters most to me, and if the writing isn’t telling that story quite well enough, they help me get there.
As a side note: the risk of vulnerability is what feels scary. Exposure of your core self, even after years of knowing and working within this bubble. As the work seems to matter more to us, the search for the right audience gets more intense. To me, it’s about the human need for authentic communication—I have something that means a lot to me and I want you to get it too. I even want it to matter a lot to you.
Is this naive, especially in today’s super cynical world? To me, it’s the real reason I write. But the risk is still there, and as I move out into the world with my soon-to-be-released novel, I need help navigating the road to my readership, wherever they are.
Saunders’s post gave me momentum to find a way.
The gatekeepers of the publishing world—agents, editors, marketing teams—have a vetting process that lets you know if you’ve landed close to ideal reader territory. We assume these gatekeepers know their literary worlds. They only accept writing that aligns with their readership. At least that’s the premise. And why editors strongly encourage reading their publications first, why agents want you to check out what else they represent.
Even after we pass through the gates of publication, each new project may bring a similar confusion. Book publication forces us to get specific about the market for each new book. No piece of writing will appeal to everyone, all women or all kids or all anything.
Communication with a reader is not generic.
Seen from this perspective, a lot of the emotion of rejection slips away. It’s not that your writing is not worthy; it’s more that it hasn’t found its ideal readership yet. That’s why you’re encouraged not to give up—to keep submitting until you find a home.
A small example of this happened in one of my online classes. A good writer, I’ll call her Alana, kept receiving confusing responses to her posts. She was a lyrical writer, a poet under her plot, and she’d found herself in a classroom of thriller and rom com authors-to-be. Most of the time, they’d respond with something unhelpful like “I’m confused by all the imagery, I can’t follow the plot.” A typical “I don’t get it” response.
She consulted with me privately, feeling hurt and frustrated. I suggested she transfer out of the class into a poetry or metaphor workshop. I sensed that her readership would more likely be other lyrical writers. And it was. She ended up happy and productive, her faith in her particular style and voice restored.
Of course, even with like-minded readers, as Saunders says in his post, you can still meet those who don’t get you or your work. The editor vets it, it gets published, and you still find people going, “Huh?” or worse. Reviews can be good or not so good. Important to realize that this is normal; a certain percentage won’t ever get what you’re trying to express. They’re not all going to be your writerly kin. Accept this, however bruising it feels. You’ve launched your paper airplane, it got crumpled by some. But most, if you’re lucky and the editor is good, will keep it aloft.
Successful writers know what they are trying to say, the meaning of their work, and its uniqueness. Their next step is to figure out how it aligns to a certain readership. Comp titles, which sell your manuscript to agents and editors, are a first step—they help you and the publishing world see where your readers congregate.
All efforts to spread the word need to fall on open ears. You need to know your community of readers, even if they are still faceless. How do you find out who they are? How do you even describe them? And where do you find them?
One would think that publishers are responsible, along with publicists, for helping you figure this out. But often, in my experience, they don’t. When I wrote my first novel, Qualities of Light, my editor was convinced my readership would be gay readers, mostly young women. The story is about a teenager who almost loses her young brother in a boating accident she was responsible for. The same week, a newcomer comes to town, a waterskiing champion, and the two young women fall in love, much to the narrator’s surprise.
The publisher, certain of this audience, marketed accordingly. I did my bit, but I didn’t know that community very well so I talked about the book more generally. I thought my readers would resonate with family struggles, with teenagers coming of age, with sudden tragedy. This would be my tribe.
When interviews began, I got to test this out.
I was lucky enough to be interviewed by Faith Middleton of Connecticut NPR. Faith is retired now, but she was one of the best interviewers I’ve ever encountered. I came in with notes and she said, “We won’t need those.” She proceeded to talk, like we were friends at a book club meeting. It was super casual, despite my constant awareness that this was National Public Radio! She asked me questions about my family of characters, about their tragedy sand loss, about the coming of age of the narrator, Molly. These topics resonated with her.
Same thing the next day, when a newspaper reporter called me for an interview. Same with the readers at my three book signings, the media who interviewed me after the launch.
Obviously, the publisher hadn’t guessed right about the ideal reader for this book—the niche was too narrow by far.
But it was more than that, I think now. The publisher pegged the book for its political agenda. I wrote it for an entirely different reason—to explore the relationship between a damaged father and his daughter. He’s had an affair, his wife is about to leave him, then this accident happens which forces them together. That’s what I was most interested in. And Faith turned out to be one of my readers who got that.
With my new novel, I wanted to do this “ideal reader” thing better. I wanted to understand the process, answer the question that George Saunders presented from his subscriber. I started with his very accurate theory that we write for ourselves, so I began imagining people like me. Who were they? How would I describe them?
To do this well, I first had to ask: what was I like, as a reader? What did I resonate with in books I loved?
I came up with this list:
I love complex stories where the narrators grow in unexpected ways.
I like a spiritual tone to the story—not overt (religious) but a belief in meaning of life, of greater good in humans in general, in the idea that good triumphs even if people do terrible things to each other.
I appreciate resonate settings—where the landscape is a character too.
I want to learn something about some cool aspect of living, a skill, an occupation or a passion I don’t know much about.
I want page-turners. But I also want incredibly beautiful language that makes me stop and go, “Wow, what a sentence.”
I like getting into a story fairly quickly, but if the language is breath-taking, I’m OK taking some time.
I adore great dialogue. Smart and snappy with tons of undertone.
I want the ending to loop back to the beginning, nothing left hanging.
It was a start. Now I had a checklist, a literary perspective, for my ideal reader. This is what they looked for in a novel. Next step was getting specific about their lives. Here’s what I considered next:
Age—it makes a big difference what generation your reader feels most at home in. In a post for “Moms Who Write,” Kathryn Tamburri notes, “Younger readers, statistically, want a book that moves faster. Older readers are going to understand more complex words and associate differently with the same words.” That will also affect how the reader reacts to your characters, she says.
Demographics—is your ideal reader educated, are they comfortable financially, do they come from a marginalized culture, are they rural or city folks?
Allegiances—like faith, family, politics. Are they open to diversity?
Where they hang out online—do they prefer podcasts or youtube videos, are they more at home on Facebook or Instagram or Tiktok, do they text or use email? Or are they most at home outside of virtual reality?
Attitude—I figured most of my readers would appreciate the bad-ass nature of my three female narrators, so I imagine my ideal reader has some sassy inside too.
Genres—what genres do your readers love and where does your book most comfortably land? You only have to start checking out bookstagrammers and other book bloggers to see how important this is. If you can define your genre, you’ll be able to find out more of where those readers hang on online. My new novel straddles genres, as one of my reviewers helpfully pointed out: it’s part thriller (there’s a crime and someone running from it, and there’s a Search & Rescue mission in the remote mountains of upper New York state) and part family relationships (two estranged sisters reunite). The two genres don’t easily walk hand-in-hand, but that’s the intriguing part of the story, to me. It just makes it slightly harder to nail that ideal reader niche.
When I consider these questions, my earlier efforts to find my ideal reader seem like spaghetti strands thrown against a wall—what hits, hits; what doesn’t, collapses on the floor. No wonder I was so surprised at Faith’s interview questions about my book, at the other interviews I had.
But I still sensed there was more I could do to get to know this ideal reader. That’s when I got the idea to interview myself about my book.
The idea came as I was putting together a press kit for my new website. (I learned how to build the website myself on Squarespace through an excellent tutorial, a fascinating experience I’ll share in another newsletter, but you’re welcome to check out my new presence in the world, my coming out as an author, by viewing the site here.) A press kit usually includes interview questions. Hosts like to have prompts to start with, so authors think up questions they’d like to answer.
As the author, you get the first chance at creating great questions. As I was brainstorming these, I began writing out the responses. And suddenly, I got a sense of my ideal reader at a personal level, beyond demographics and age and listening preferences. It was as if I grokked their reasons for life.
Here are the questions I used (these have to do with my book, but it’s a cool exercise to imagine your own). I made some obvious and some hard, but I made all of them open doorways to sharing me, why I wrote this book, what matters most to me about it.
A story about Search & Rescue operations is fairly unique. What inspired this book—how did you get interested in the topic of SAR?
As an author, which of your characters do you most identify with? Are any of them based on yourself or people in your life?
Why is this set in the Adirondacks?
Reviewers have called your novel “cross-genre,” meaning it straddles both the crime thriller and the women’s fiction genres. Was it challenging to write across two genres? What went into your decision to do so?
The story is one of abandonment: Red and Kate’s father has hurt them through his absence. How did you decide to write John, their father, as someone they accept by the end, despite his very real flaws?
Two of the characters have same-sex relationships. Is this an important aspect of the story, to you?
Sisters and the sisterly bond is key to the relationship aspect of the story. What prompted you to write about sisters?
What do you hope readers will take away from your story?
The answers surprised me. They felt very personal and intimate, not at all polished or prepared. More like the thrill of real communication I felt that day in the studio with Faith Middleton. It also helped me get clear about what I had to say about this book—my talking points, as it were. What I most loved and wanted to explore with a like-minded interviewer.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
I’ve given three different techniques in this newsletter as ways to access your ideal readership. Try one or all of them this week.
Brainstorm a list of what you, as a reader, love about the books you really get into; see if this gives you a literary view of an ideal reader, if they were similar to you.
Research specifics about your ideal reader’s background, seeing how detailed you can get. Sometimes it helps to look at comp (comparison) titles—books like yours—and see who recommends them on Goodreads or other sites.
Create interview questions for yourself about your book. Then answer them.