Here are some of the thoughts I’ve been having about my readers. The full essay can be found on my Substack.
At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Dickens, like a good con man, asks for reader buy in with the very first words, words to the effect of “believe me. I’m the author. I’m your guide. Follow me for a good time.”
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.
Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
But then a reader has to believe, or pretend to believe, that Marley is a ghost. It becomes a reader’s creed, and once you get someone to believe the unbelievable you have opened many gates for a reader’s journey.
Or a reader could be the recipient of an open-ended query as in Mary Oliver’s “The Poet Goes to Indiana.”
I’ll tell you a half-dozen things
that happened to me
in Indiana
when I went that far west to teach.
You tell me if it was worth it.
If you find yourselves baffled by a reader, take heart. You are, to paraphrase Prague poet Willie Watson, doing the same work Charles Dickens and Mary Oliver did. Perhaps just follow a grandmother’s advice for most recipes: Make it with lots of love.
I know. I know. Writers should write and not talk about writing or think about writing. I consider myself enough of a writers to be an ace procrastinator, and if you’re a writer or just a critic. Plenty of mavens out there: George Saunders, Steven King, John Gardner, E.M. Forster. And plenty of direction. Who’s Show don’t tell. Don’t use adverbs. Write early in the morning. Write late at night. Write drunk, write sober, etc. But it makes good conversation fodder. And if you’re in Prague and want to take a break from writing, email me. I can plan a gathering where we don’t write and talk and maybe only feel just a little bit guilty about it.
Here’s a topic we can start with — Does reading aloud from your work help? — from this week’s George Saunders “Office Hours.”