It’s our responsibility as writers to give readers a good experience when they pick up our books and stories. If we don’t respect their time and intelligence, they’re not very likely to listen to what we have to say in its entirety, let alone take a look at our other work.
But how do we do that? Here’s what I’ve learned after years of reading stuff I’ve liked (and disliked):
What’s obvious to you isn’t obvious to others
Derek Sivers made this point on his blog ages ago: a lot of things that we take for granted are completely novel for others. As a writer, this means that if we pay attention to our routines and surroundings with this perspective, we’ll find that there’s a lot more to write about than we thought.
It’s also useful craft advice: when it comes to showing, make sure that what’s obvious to you in your mind’s eye is just as clear to the reader because they can see only what you will point them towards.
Provide context
Who’s your audience? I grew up reading countless articles and stories on the internet from my desktop in India. Years later, I realised that most of this writing had been done by people living in the U.S.A., and that they were writing for their fellow Americans. This is known as defaultism or Americentrism. When I noticed that most people reading my blog were not Indians, I started adding notes to my writing, to explain the meaning of Hindi and Marathi terms or the festivals and traditions we have here.
This does not mean that I erase my identity and my culture. A lot of my essays and blog posts emerged from my personal and cultural experiences and how they compared with what I saw on the internet or read in English books. When I write for my fellow countrypeople, I don’t add those explanatory notes.
Each piece has a context, an audience (real or assumed). If we know that our writing would be published in a place that has an international, rather than a regional or a local, audience, then it’s our job to put our ideas into context before assuming that the reader has all the background information that we do. (This can be done both explicitly and implicitly, by weaving the context throughout the piece.)
Limit the jargon, but respect the reader’s intelligence
Sometimes, jargon is required. It’s better to use the name for a concept or phenomenon if it does exist—capitalism, nihilism, colonialism, greenwashing, and so on—because these terms offer much value and articulation in a succinct way. But throw too many of these (closely) together and the reader might end up confused rather than informed. To prevent this, I make a note to myself: Don’t show off. My job is to communicate and clarify, not confuse or impress.
Similarly, a piece full of declarations without any explanations or nuances can leave the reader unfulfilled. For example, don’t proclaim that the examination system makes students feel helpless and therefore it needs to be rehauled. Explain how the system works, why it creates helplessness, and what the rehauling would involve.
The first is a general statement that doesn’t lead to any new learning for the reader or help them think about possible solutions. The elaboration is what will do that. Too often, I’ve seen pieces that simply stay on the surface, making generic statements. To avoid this, add examples and data. Consider other perspectives. Mention caveats.
This can be applied to fiction too, as Richard Price explains: “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”
It’s easy to confuse nuance with over-explanation. If our example is well-chosen and our argument explained with clarity, the reader will stay with us. Over-explanation implies that we do not trust our readers’ intelligence. We end up talking at them, rather than having a conversation.
Don’t assume their purpose in reading
The reason a writer wrote a piece may not be the same as the reason that the reader chose to read it—entertainment, perhaps, or learning, or analysis.
What you share might be something they might have never thought about, or never even known about. As David Perell said, “Humanity advances from people sharing knowledge. All of us walk on top of a stage raised by generations of people who lived before us and shared their best ideas. If you know things that other people should know about, you have a moral obligation to write about those things. Otherwise, humanity doesn’t benefit from your learning and hard-earned lessons.”
Writing and sharing our writing is a gift to the reader. Ethan Hawke put it beautifully in his TED Talk, talking about the importance of art and creativity:
“Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. Right? They have a life to live, and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life, and, “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?”
We cannot control the impact our writing can have on others. By rejecting our ideas, by not writing and not sharing them when we have put our honest efforts into them, we disrespect ourselves and our readers. You may not think your writing is important, useful, or necessary, but someone else might. The least we can do is give them the opportunity to find that out themselves, rather than assuming on their behalf.
Something should change
Both fiction and nonfiction are essentially about some kind of change, be it internal or external—something that didn’t exist before does by the end, the status quo is transformed, or a person is. Every piece of writing is therefore a kind of journey. When change is absent from our writing, there’s a feeling in the reader of being lost. “What was that about?” they wonder. Or there’s a feeling of disappointment.
Personally, I experience this when a writer goes on a dozen different tangents and doesn’t wrap up any of them, when they ask a question (through an essay or a character) but we learn nothing from their query (exploration doesn’t have to lead to a solution, but there must be an attempt to look for answers, rather than staying in one place).
In fiction, it feels like I’ve been cheated, when, after a prolonged struggle, everything suddenly takes a U-turn and goes perfectly for no reason one can point to. Similarly, it’s disappointing when I root for a character only for them to repeat their mistakes, despite learning otherwise. If they’re not going to change and grow, why should I keep reading to see them make the same errors in a dozen different ways?
Experiences can change someone for the worse, too, and that makes for an interesting story as well. What doesn’t keep my attention is stillness, a lack of change.
Keep the Point of View consistent
There’s no reason you have to use just one point of view (PoV). Stories with multiple points of view can and do work—provided that you make these shifts clear. Brandon Sanderson does this excellently in his brick-sized books set in the Cosmere, the fictional universe he created. During the climaxes, we get to see as many as a dozen perspective shifts, but it’s always clear whose PoV we’re seeing things from.
On the other hand are stories where I thought I was experiencing events only through the perspective of a single character, until another showed up unexpectedly in the very next line, with no indication that the shift was happening. When the narration returned to the first character and then again to a different character, I was confused. Who was I hearing from? What was really happening? Perhaps the writer wanted to fill in the gaps that each character’s PoV had, but this approach made the unfolding of the events muddy, rather than clear. It was also difficult to understand whose feelings were being referred to–was it the first narrator’s, or the second’s?
When we chose a single character as our narrator, there are inevitably things we have to leave out. If our story still requires a bird’s eye view, then it’s the job of the writer to figure out the best narrator for it—and not of the reader to put things together to make sense of what’s going on, especially when the perspective shift comes at them unexpectedly, with no clear markers.
Finally, avoid redundancy
And exit on time.
Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
