As I shelve, I am always thinking about the readers who have
read the books now being returned to the shelves. It stretches my understanding
to know what people are reading. In many ways, readers drive book publishing.
Readers seem to wait for thick new books by James Patterson, Catherine Cookson,
Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Debbie Macomber, David Baldacchi, Danielle Steel
and many others. These romance and thriller writers, like the mystery and
science fiction writers, churn out one book after another. These are the
writers who give readers puzzles to solve or predictable stories to while away
time. The writers who come up with the right formula, use it again and again.
And the publishing world bows to this best-selling readers’ market.
Outside genre fiction, it isn’t so easy for writers.
Nevertheless, despite the competition, recent times have been the era of the
writer. Poets and Writers magazine publishes page after page of ads for
writing workshops, MFA programs, fellowships, and writing contests of all
kinds. Workshops explain how wonderful it is to write for all kinds of reasons,
to feel more human, to find out what you think, to share your experiences and
what you learned from them. Anyone who wants to can keep a blog or publish a
book, and books are certainly not the only media where writers are found.
Everyone writes!
But all writers must consider their readers. In a New York Public Library discussion, Jeffrey Eugenides
earnestly told Salman Rushdie that in his writing process he progressed from
focusing on the sentence, to working with the plot, and that now his main interest
was the character. The masterful Rushdie rejoined that in his work, his point
of view had moved from that of the writer to that of the reader. “There may be
a perfect way to tell a story. In that case you must ask yourself, what does
the reader need to know? You must become the reader.”
My cousin Helen Frost [http://www.helenfrost.net/], who has
been writing books long enough to see her readers criss-cross the globe with
recommendations of her work, also recently said, “Sometimes I think writers get
too much credit for what happens in the experience of a book.” Just yesterday
at lunch, someone who says she doesn’t read very much, told me how moved she
had been by Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, how every sentence got down to
reality. I’ve never read it, and I find there is some controversy about whether
Hemingway would have published it, had he been alive. But I wanted to run right
out and get it! And when I do read it, you may be sure I will think of Mary,
readership in common being one of the many pleasures of reading.
