Give Unto Others: Or Perhaps Not

            Should a writer provide "what readers want?"

        Human relationships are tricky things. Romance, for example, is fraught with misunderstanding and incompatible desires. Most humans expect to meet a “right person” to love or marry, yet must learn how to recognize so elusive a being and to develop healthy patterns of mutual interaction.

            I myself am seeking to better understand my authorial relationship with readers.

            I receive conflicting advice. Writers must choose an audience and write for it specifically! No, writers should simply write what they wish to read themselves. Writers will make no money if they do not respond to market demand. No, writers will never be worth reading if they do not find their own unique voice and hope that others wish to listen to it.

            In his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie instructs his readers to consider others’ wants and desires. He says to frame the presentation of one’s own request in a way that persuades people that they will get what they want if they do what one asks. This applies to writing. If I want other people to read my fiction, I must offer them something desirable, even if only the relief of suspense I have created. I cannot expect anyone to seek out my work if they are disappointed and displeased with the endings I provide. Yet stories which give readers exactly what they want (and expect) are transient and forgettable. In the end, we remember the book in which the boy’s dog dies, the hero is changed beyond repair, or the devastating betrayal is unexpected. Yet even these endings (although not what the reader wants) must satisfy the audience.

            How does one achieve this? In one of my writing groups, the members clamored for the protagonist of my story to act in a way that was completely contrary to the idea of the entire piece. Their feelings demonstrate that my story is not yet successful. Somehow, I must discover a way to persuade my readers to want what I want them to want, and to ultimately accept my answer. For this to happen, my ending must seem to flow naturally from the events that precede it, and (if it is a particularly hard sell) events must be arranged so that the audience feels it to be better, or truer, than the alternatives.

            Oddly enough, it is currently easier to set up a story so that the audience will want the protagonist to do a “bad thing” than a “right thing.” We are all familiar with the mechanics that are used to persuade us that we want the hero to illegally kill the villain. Less comfortable, less satisfying, and less salable is a story in which the hero nobly sacrifices his desires instead of his enemy. This is the true challenge. This is an opportunity to subvert readers’ expectations and provide something genuinely unexpected. I find it an attractively difficult goal and have been pondering it at length. How can a writer do this? I am still working on it.