Writer v. Reader: How to Talk About Your Novel

You can work as a writer, or you can react as a reader. 

It’s about tools versus feelings, craft versus critique, and action versus reaction.

It’s about being sensitive to the language we use when we talk about our novels.

Writers are readers, of course, and readers can act as editors, giving writers feedback. But writers and readers represent two different perspectives—before the novel exists and after the novel exists—and therefore use language differently. Writers speak from the POV of the creator; readers, from the POV of the audience.

It’s easy to confuse the tools of the trade with the feelings of the reader.

Exciting. Suspenseful. Thrilling. Riveting. Scary. Addictive. Sad. Engaging. Romantic. Dry. Slow. Boring. Tedious. Funny. Sexy. Tense. 

These are adjectives describing the effects of a story on a reader. These are, in other words, feelings.

Even when these abstractions are used to stand in for genres of fiction (Suspense, Thriller, Horror, Romance, even Cozy Mysteries), these adjectives are not tools for a writer. They are not techniques, strategies, or story types. They are not ways of thinking about structuring a scene, a chapter, or an act. They are not helpful to the writer trying to compose a line, write a scene, or edit a chapter.

Yet it’s so easy to get confused about this.

It’s so easy to slip away from the creative perspective of the writer and fall into the critical language of the reader.

I don’t mean critical as negative. I mean critical as reactive. The reader is reacting to the story already written. They have a finished manuscript before them. Compare the reader’s perspective with that of the writer, someone who faces a blank page or a rough draft and relies on tools to create and edit and improve.

Why is it so easy to confuse the two perspectives?

I think because critics, editors, and readers tend to respond with interpretive language when they read your story, novel, or other written work, and the writer, often eager to please, internalizes that language. 

Readers sincerely believe they are helping you by telling you how they feel when they read a passage in your fiction, and that’s fine. That’s expected. I don’t expect readers of my work to speak in my language, the language of the writer’s craft.

And while I always appreciate reader reactions, I have to translate those reactions, somehow, into editorial actions. Reader reactions are of little help in figuring out how to edit my own work. I have to figure that out on my own. 

But here’s the twist. 

What happens when a novelist gets abstract reader reactions from backstage people, from editors, critics, and the authors of books on how to write?

As I mentioned in the previous post about the Story Pyramid, which I still see used in school and in writing instruction, I also see critics and some writing instructors resorting to these types of abstractions to critique novels, to examine story structure, and to suggest edits.

You’ve noticed these abstractions, most of them also metaphorical. Consider the concepts of rising and falling action and climax, yes, but also pace, tension, suspense, flow, foreshadowing, voice, and crisis, among others.

Notice how some of this language is also the language of literary criticism. 

Ah, that’s where we’ve heard this language before . . . in school! 

Yes, in English classes in middle school, high school, and college, we read fiction, and we write . . . fiction? No. We don’t read fiction to write fiction. We read fiction to write essays. We write literary criticism. We interpret the text. 

In school we learn the language in which to talk about fiction. It becomes a habit to think about fiction in terms of criticism. Even fiction writers resort to this kind of language because it’s what we’re used to. We’ve done it since sixth grade. In school, you don’t read fiction to learn how to write fiction. You read fiction to learn how to critique fiction.

Take the concept of foreshadowing. 

In Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools (2006), a book I like, he offers Tool 29: “Foreshadow dramatic events and powerful conclusions.” He refers to the short story “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, namely the early description of boys stuffing their pockets with stones. The reader doesn’t know why the boys are collecting stones, and Clark notes this as an example of foreshadowing because at the end of the story, people throw stones at the villager who “won” the lottery.

You can see how foreshadowing works best as a name for what a reader notices in a story that’s already written. You read the story and go back and see where the author hinted at what’s to come. In other words, this is the language of literary criticism.

Clark takes foreshadowing, which is a reader experience, and turns it into a tool for a writer. Use foreshadowing in your stories.

The problem is that this is backwards. It takes the name for a reader’s reaction and makes it a tool for a writer’s action. 

But a writer doesn’t think this way. 

A writer, instead, imagines the world of the story and spends time there, lives there, looks around, makes the people of that world (the characters) behave in ways that obey the rules of that fictional world.

Shirley Jackson must have spent some time in the village of her short story and imagined its geography, its climate, its housing, its inhabitants, the ways people lived and moved and spoke, what they valued, what they were afraid of, and on the day of the lottery, she noticed people gathering in the town square and noticed boys collecting stones, because, of course, that’s what the boys of this village would do on this particular day.

She didn’t tap her lips and say, “I must have foreshadowing!” That’s a perspective from outside the story. No, she was far more inwardly focused. She was sustaining that world in her mind and observing, watching, building a fictional world that made sense for the day of the lottery. 

A writer doesn’t think about foreshadowing. The writer imagines characters living in particular ways in a fictional world.

Here’s another one. Let’s consider pace. 

You’ve probably heard people talk about pace or pacing in a novel. If someone says your novel has pacing issues, they likely mean they feel a certain way reading a section of your book. Well, how can the writer translate that abstract reader feeling into the means to edit that section? 

To be honest, I have no idea. The writer needs other tools to rewrite a scene or a chapter or a sequence. Feelings about pacing offer no guidance to the writer.

In a movie, you can always cut the beginning and ending of a scene if you want to make a scene go faster. They call it “snipping the ends.” To increase the pace—one assumes, rather mindlessly—you cut, cut, cut. Cut too much, though, and you lose the meaning; the viewer becomes disoriented. 

Cut too much, in fact, and there’s no story left! 

In a novel, you might need to cut some exposition, on the assumption that less text equals a faster pace, but that’s debatable, because you might very well need to add something. Adding something might increase the drama of the scene, and more drama will likely make the reader forget all about pace (whatever pace is). 

For example, a writer might, when editing a scene, choose one of the following strategies:

• clarify a character’s intentions

• introduce a more urgent catalyst

• increase the costs of making a certain decision

• prolong a confrontation

• make the antagonist do something more devious

• force the protagonist to do something they’d never otherwise do in order to get what they want.

These are actions the writer can actually take to develop the drama of a scene. 

(For more guidance on dramatizing scenes, see my three entries called “Get the File,” Parts 1, 2, and 3.)

People who are supposed to be backstage people—critics, editors, fellow writers offering advice—often talk not in the language of the writer’s craft but instead in terms of the effects of the writing on the reader. They resort to the language of literary criticism or the language of feelings.

A reader feels excited, thrilled, riveted, or sad. They laugh. They feel bored. They sense tension or suspense or romance. 

Awesome. That’s what a novelist shoots for.

A novelist wants to make a reader feel a certain way, but you have to do so indirectly, through the writing. You are creating a work of art—a novel—and it’s by reading that novel that a reader has a unique experience. As a novelist, you have no direct access to a reader’s brain. You can’t reach into the skull and fiddle with a neural tuning dial to adjust the reader’s emotions, intelligence, or capacity for interpretation.

“Turn down CRINGE to 3, please.”

“Turn up SEXY to 7, please.”

It’s not possible . . . yet.

Instead, the novelist has access to their own brain, to their own imagination, and that’s where the novelist builds a world—in their imagination—before rebuilding that world in words on a page.

The novelist, first, needs to create a fictional world in their imagination . . . and, second, needs to write words on a page to dramatize that world . . . before they ever think about what a reader is going to build in their imagination from the novelist’s words on a page.

Here’s a theater analogy. Last example. Promise.

Think about the difference between the audience and the people backstage. 

Theater people rely on jargon to talk to each other about developing and putting on a play: downstage, blocking, booth, bump, apron, call time, cue, strike, rigging, wings, front of house, fly rail, gobo, gel, pit, proscenium, understudy, dry tech, wet tech, and so on. The audience doesn’t need to know the jargon to enjoy the play. They want to get lost in the drama and feel their feelings.

Now imagine getting rid of the specialized language that theater people use to talk to each other and replacing it with the abstract language used to describe the audience’s feelings. 

Imagine the director asking the lighting crew for “more suspense,” the playwright indicating to an actor that a line should be delivered with “rising action,” or the producer barging in during rehearsals and demanding “a more engaging pace.”

No one would know how to carry out these directions. They are general abstractions used to describe the effects of a story on the audience. That language is of no use to backstage workers performing specific tasks in order to stage a play.

Same goes for cooks in a restaurant kitchen (“Cook me that tasty dish with the surprising hint of yummy”), carpenters roughing in the frame of a house (“Build the cozy room that feels intimate yet forgiving”), and coaches yelling out plays to their teams (“Do those amazing moves that score some points we can cheer about”).

When you’re doing the work, you don’t use the language of effects. You use the shorthand language defining the tasks to be performed to achieve those effects.

My point is that while this is absurd in theater (and in cooking, construction, sports, law, medicine, and so on), it is for some reason done all the time in fiction.

We writers, when working backstage, so to speak, too often slip between causes and effects, between tasks and feelings, between the writer’s techniques and the audience’s reactions. 

Writers are also readers, of course. We are at once creator and audience. We can read like an audience immediately after we write like a writer. We can slip back and forth in our roles. We can run from backstage to front row and go around and round again.

That’s the description of the dynamic, and it can be super frustrating if you aren’t aware of it.

You can drive yourself crazy if you mix up craft and critique, tools and feelings, action and reaction, backstage and the house. 

You can drive yourself crazy if you’re thinking like a literary critic while you’re trying to write like a novelist.

So here’s my point.

Be aware of the differences between the reader and writer perspectives. 

Be sensitive to language when talking about your novel. 

Know when you’re talking like a reader or a critic.

And know when you need to leave your aisle seat and slip backstage to talk and imagine and pick up a stone like a writer.
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