Playwrights and screenwriters write for a medium where the enjoyment of their work is shared by a mass audience, the folks in the theater, who eat popcorn and experience the magic of the production together as a group.
An author writing a book is a different matter. A book is not like a theatrical production or a movie. A book has the smallest audience possible: an audience of one.
The reader.
It’s an intimate relationship. Writing a novel is a partnership between just two people: the writer and the reader. But before a writer can enter into a partnership with a reader, they need to know the reader—what the reader likes, what they love, and what they hate. Love and hate are tools that the novelist uses to reach the reader’s emotions. If the writer doesn’t know what their reader loves and hates, they can’t effectively find the reader’s soul and touch it with their prose.
Stephen King says he writes each and every one of his books for one person: his wife Tabitha. “I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer must consider, ‘I wonder what she will think when she reads this part?’”
Similarly, John Steinbeck advised writers, “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person, and write to that one.”
The whole concept of the ideal reader blew me away when I first learned of it, because Steinbeck was right, trying to write to satisfy everybody is an exercise in impossibility. You can never succeed. But writing for just one person, well, that’s a lot easier. The opinions and reactions of an ideal reader can help shape an author’s writing voice, guide their narrative, and influence the way they tell their stories.
For many novelists, including yours truly, the ideal reader is a shadowy figure who stands behind them while they write, peering over their shoulder, judging every sentence and every word. The ideal reader is both a source of inspiration and a terrible critic, pushing writers to do their best work while also forcing them to second-guess their choices.
Yes, it’s a little creepy. But novelists are, by definition, a little insane, so it goes with the territory.
It took me a long time to decide who my ideal reader was. I tried to imagine a fourteen year old teen, like myself, at the age where I first read Lord of the Rings and was swept away. But it didn’t seem right to use myself as my ideal reader. After all, I might go easy on myself, and that’s not the purpose of an ideal reader.
In the end, I decided on not one, but three ideal readers, each with their own set of exacting standards and expectations. One would have to search far and wide to find a more difficult trio of readers to satisfy, but I am a glutton for punishment. They are:
J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Except not when they were old and established, but when they were young readers, before they became giants of literature. Everything I write, I write to entertain young Tolkien, Clarke, and Le Guin. I work incredibly hard to write stuff I truly hope that they might enjoy.
To satisfy Clarke, who was a seminal master of hard sci-fi, I try my best to write with scientific accuracy, to the best of my understanding, and to present new scientific ideas so that they have as solid a basis in real science as possible.
To satisfy Tolkien, who is to me the undisputed master of worldbuilding and, arguably, epic story structure, I try to create characters that are deeply rooted in the worlds they inhabit, and where the worlds themselves have such a depth of landscape and histories that they become characters of the story, too.
To satisfy Le Guin, who was a master of subtle, socially conscious sci-fi, I strive to portray my imaginary worlds in such a way as they might shed a different light on our contemporary experience and maybe give readers a new perspective on the modern-day, real-world in which they live.
Let’s be real, though. I know I can never dream of approaching the quality of their writing, nor their inventiveness. But just having them looking over my shoulder while I write, listening to their whispers as they judge my words and sentences and ideas, makes me a better writer. I’ve read everything they’ve written, more than once. I’ve been locked in the telepathic author-reader link that can only come from reading with all three of them, so many times that I feel an intimate kinship. I feel like I know them as well, or even better, than most of my real-life friends.
See, I told you it was a little creepy. But it’s also kind of wonderful.
I actually met Ursula Le Guin in 1975, when I was thirteen years old. I was attending my first ever sci-fi convention, and she was one of the featured guests. I remember hurrying into the hotel ballroom to see her speak. I was late when I arrived, and the only seat left was in the back row, far from the podium, next to a nice lady with a mushroom-top of short-cropped graying hair. I was a shy kid, but I was excited, so when she said, “Hi,” my mouth started blabbering about how amazing it was to actually get to see a real-live author in person. The lady asked me what Le Guin books I’d read. I told her I’d read “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Word for World is Forest.” She asked me which I liked the best, and I told her “Forest.” She asked me what I liked about it, but before I could answer, the announcer came to the stage and called the crowd to order. At that moment, the nice lady sitting next to me gave me a smile, stood, tousled my hair, and walked all the way up the center aisle to the stage.
I’d been sitting next to—and talking to—Ursula K. Le Guin herself. I was so flabbergasted that I can’t remember a single thing she said in her talk. I probably wasn’t even listening. My mind was completely short-circuited.
More recently, in March 2020, I visited Arthur C. Clarke in Colombo, Sri Lanka. At the time of my visit, he’d been dead for twelve years, but that hardly diminished my excitement. I’d been stuck in a Sri Lankan apartment for a month-long quarantine during a bout of the original version of COVID. Once the quarantine was over, on the first day I felt able, I went looking for Mr. Clarke’s grave. It was not easy to find. I was hoping for a tall black monolith like the one from his masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey” as his gravestone, but it turned out that his grave was modest, tucked in a row of other graves with no special distinction. I spent a long time with Mr. Clarke in quiet contemplation of his legacy. His writing altered the course of the lives of millions of readers, including me. His humanist brand of sci-fi made incredibly exciting futures seem not only possible, but plausible. He altered everyone’s lives, actually, including yours—in addition to his writing, he’s the man who invented the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite. We might not have global communications today without Clarke.
I never met J.R.R. Tolkien, but I did once have a Tolkien-legacy experience when hiking in a dense copse of woods near his beloved Oxford University in England. As soon as the trail entered the wood, I instantly experienced a powerful feeling of déjà vu. This feeling only increased the deeper I moved into the dark wood. The trail was narrow, the canopy dense, and the trees leaned close, their limbs tearing at my clothes. I even remember thinking to myself, “this place is positively Tolkienesque.” Sure enough, upon exiting the copse, I found a sign proclaiming that the woods I’d just passed through were a favorite walking spot for Professor Tolkien, and many believe they were his inspiration for the Old Forest, which appears in “The Fellowship of the Ring.”
Writing for such a trio of ideal readers might sound like a daunting task, but it’s also an incredibly rewarding one. The challenge of trying to meet the high standards set by Clarke, Tolkien, and Le Guin forces me to stretch my imagination and hone my craft. Their ghostly approval (or disapproval) serves as a North Star, guiding me through the storms of the creative process.
Sure, it might be a little unsettling having three literary legends, all of them dead, looking over my shoulder in a small room for hours on end. But, hey, it’s not like they’re going to jump out and shout “Boo!” (I hope). I mean, if anyone catches me talking to myself, I’ll just say I’m having an intense brainstorming session with my esteemed panel of critics. Nothing weird about that, right?
In the end, my spectral critics keep me grounded and motivated. They remind me that while writing is a solitary endeavor, it’s ultimately about connecting with someone else on a deeply personal level. And though my ideal readers might be figments of my imagination, their influence is very real.
So, here’s to writing for the audience of one—or three —who make every word worthwhile.
And if anyone asks why I leave the light on when I write, I’ll just nod and smile nervously…
