By Jesse Steele

It is an astonishing fact that many experienced as well as inexperienced writers with whom I have worked have not given much thought to what the reader is experiencing in each scene of a novel. Perhaps it is because courtesy—considering the experience of the reader—is often ignored in dry schooling, where literature is examined for structure and technique more than effect. Consider also that many newcomers to writing want to get something off their chests, which leads them to imagine the audience as passive receptors rather than active enjoyers of a heightened experience fashioned for them by the writer.

~ Sol Stein, How to Grow a Novel, Chapter 1: The Responsibilities of the Writer Sol Stein knows novels, and has done readers and writers everywhere the great courtesy of sharing what he knows in his book How to Grow a Novel. In the first chapter, Stein bestows upon us an insight not often talked about in ‘writerly’ circles but often felt by readers; the importance of thinking about the reader’s experience as she reads the book you’re writing. What is the reader feeling? Is he interested, engaged, excited? Or confused, bored, annoyed? Is what you’re writing fascinating to you because you’re writing it, or is it actually fascinating? Essentially, are you writing for yourself or for your reader, or both? In the current social climate of encouraging the ‘right’ to be creative, there needs (at least in this writer’s opinion and obviously in Sol Stein’s) to be a distinction between writing for one’s own creative (or emotional or cathartic) outlet and writing a story for an audience. Obviously these things can coexist and do—but when writers are writing to, as Stein says, get something off their chests, there’s not much room in that process for the experience of the audience.

Coming from a background of populist poetry, Spoken Word and writing/art as political activism, I struggled at first with the idea of considering whether the audience was enjoying the work. I wasn’t writing to entertain—I was writing to wake people up, to make them uncomfortable with their status quo, to shock them a little. But as I traveled the country and heard many of the most successful writers of this kind, I found they were almost always the storytellers—the writers who conveyed their outrage, their politics, their theories, their ideas via stories about people—strong, identifiable characters who inspired empathy, made us wonder what they would do next, shared their accessible, relatable journeys of loss or discovery or enlightenment or whatever.

Stein says what the reader wants is an experience different from and greater than his or her everyday experiences in life. We all do when we read, and when we write, that same idea should be present. Whether I’m reading a historical novel set in the seventeenth century or a sci-fi novel set in deep space or a fantasy set in a made-up world, I want that novel to be alive with the sensory details of the setting so that I’m immersed in that world, but I don’t want to be bogged down in details, reading descriptions so in-depth they make my eyes cross—I still want the story to be about the characters and their actions in their struggles and triumphs. I want those triumphs to be on a grander scale, maybe, than my own life, but I want the hero or heroine’s internal struggles with belief, love, family, purpose, etc. to be relatable to my own life. I want to see a young hero nervous about talking to a girl in a regular teenage-boy way, even though he’s a legendary warrior and not a regular boy, and the ‘girl’ is not an ordinary girl but a princess or a faerie queen.

In the first chapter of How to Grow a Novel, Stein compares the responsibility of the writer to his reader to that of a lover to his partner: ultimately, to pleasure her—but to take his time doing so, building tension so that the reward is that much greater for her anticipation of it. We often talk, as writers, about our own needs—the need to express, to tell our truths, be they theoretical or imaginary or factual. The rarely asked question Stein poses is simple: if a writer’s partner, the reader, were to ask today “What have you done for me lately?” what could he say? Has he provided her a good fight between matched adversaries? Enveloping action and heightened experience? Tension and hints at the prize, then misdirection lest she get her answer too soon? Did she almost miss her bus to work because she had to know what happened to Anne? Did he create characters for her that populate her thoughts even when she’s not reading, people real enough that she’s dreamed about them, thinks of them as folks she knows? Did he write her a whole story full of scenes, of people doing and saying instead of narrating and explaining? Did he turn the path right when she was about to figure it out, make her grumpy in the moment he was redirecting her attention and then distract her so completely she ceased to be annoyed? Did he bring her back again to the thing she’d forgotten to wonder about and delight her with an ending she hadn’t expected but knew made perfect sense? Did he, at last, leave her satisfied?

In practical terms, Sol Stein is asking the writer to do the simplest and most counterintuitive thing possible—to step outside his story. What happens if the writer walks out, drops his self-consciousness, his point, and his need for expression on the lawn and walks back into his story thinking only of his partner? How does his story feel to her? Is it too barren? Does it feel hurried, cluttered? Where are the soft places she can rest? Where are the fascinating things for her to look at? Has he given away all his secrets at once, or is he flirting, hiding, and revealing to tease her along, her eyes wide with the suspense of it? Of course, though her ultimate goal is satisfaction, what she wants is to be wooed, delighted, surprised, fascinated, and (though she likely won’t admit it) even a bit frustrated on her way there, all for the purpose of making the satisfaction that much more—well, satisfying. So her newly courteous partner must align his feet on that thread between accessible and predictable and then patiently wobble until he finds balance.

How, then, does our writer accomplish such a lofty goal? He listens to Sol Stein’s advice, that’s how. He plans ahead with his partner in mind. Or he walks away, also with his partner in mind. He has to look at each scene as if he were reading it, not writing it.

For scenes he has already written, he has to set them down for a period of time before beginning the revisions. If the writing has been allowed to cool, when the writer rereads that scene he will experience some level of the emotion that will be felt by the reader coming upon the scene for the first time. If the writer experiences ennui or nothing, he cannot expect the reader to feel more.

If, however, our writer has been lucky enough to come across this thought earlier in his process, Stein suggests he make an outline of scenes only instead of the traditional but limiting synopsis or full outline. In filling in this outline, he should consider these questions:

• Which character in the scene do you have the most affection for? How can you make the reader feel affection or compassion for that character in this scene?
• Is there a character in this scene who threatens the protagonist subtly or openly, psychologically or physically?
• Is the point of view of the scene that of the character who is most affected by what happens in the scene?
• Is the scene described in terms of the action that takes place?
• Is each scene visible throughout so that the reader can see what’s happening before his eyes?
• Does the ending thrust the reader into the next scene? Does the reader long to find out what happens next?

The points to remember:

The ideal arrangement is to have scene after scene with nothing in between. If you build to a scene don’t let the reader’s emotions rest. Salt your buildup with ominous detail. At the end of each chapter, be sure you are thrusting the reader forward to the next chapter, then don’t take the reader where the reader wants to go.

The writer will only gain from his newfound generosity, and his reader will reward him for his efforts. As Stein so elegantly puts it, the pleasured reader will be grateful and loyal to the writer, buying each book and looking forward to the next one.

I, for one, am always loyal to those writers who have taken the time to do me the courtesy of considering my experience of their writing. I always go back for more.

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