Leaving readers better off than when I found them, I hope -- Garbo

For those of us who write, or who think we might want to write, It's my view that we ought to take a moment to think about our readers. I'm not talking marketing today, though of course focusing on your demographic(s) is important if you want your work to reach a wider audience. Today I'm thinking about the effects our words have on our readers.

Personally, I like to leave my reader better off than when they started reading my words. As anyone who was in Scouts or the Camp Fire programs learned, one is supposed to leave a campsite better than they found it. That's my goal for people who have begun (and finished, I hope!) one of my books or stories. 

Now, the meaning of "better off" could be a matter of debate. if someone felt fine when they started my story and then they were sad afterward, one could argue that "better off" might be the wrong phrase. But if someone does feel sadness, my intention is that this would be as a result of compassion for a character, who stands for someone in the real world, or maybe a whole group of someones. I'm always hope that short-term sadness will be replaced with long-term understanding.

The older I get, the more careful I am about what I write -- or what I share, anyway. Words can't be taken back. A lot of religions and spiritual teachings have some kind of teaching on this idea, often involving feathers flying out of a broken pillow and traveling everywhere. One can delete a tweet or take a blog post down, but still. . .

In English Composition I or Intro to Journalism, we were required to sort out the reason we were writing -- to inform, to persuade, and so on. My own system for figuring out how and why I'm affecting my readership with my work is based on more casual -- but what I see as more important -- self-inquiry:

Is it for me or is it for them?

Venting isn't writing. Thinly-veiled cruel characterizations of people we're too chicken to confront isn't writing, or not very good writing anyway. Sometimes words like that need to happen but they are for journals, or for deleting after typing. Even if I have a nobler purpose than letting steam off or taking a bite out of someone, let's say  to set the record straight if I think my actions were misjudged or if something happened to me and I never got a chance to work things out, that's still not real writing as I define it. Nothing wrong with it, but I can't pretend it's not for me. It's like buying a close friend a theoretical holiday gift I keep for myself.

Whose story didn't get told or got told wrong?

One of the ways I try to help readers become better off is to introduce them to people I feel they ought to know. The title character of my novel Rusty was based on someone I knew from Indianapolis. The main character in the novella "Madame Grumpetta" experiences a life event similar to something that happened to a celebrity some years back.  My short story "The Land of Corn and Wine" is based on a job I had for a few months, with characters standing in for my employer and my co-worker.

Where did this weird idea come from? 

I'm often not thinking of the reader when I start a new project. That is, my conscious self is not. But often I find that my higher self is finding a way to go deep and really look at a situation, and to share that deep focus with readers. Often, in this circumstance, I have to figure out my motivation after I've written the piece. 

I got the title and opening paragraph for my tale "Bing Cherries" after buying fruit at an upscale produce market. The story turned out to be about marital communication (or the lack of it) but I didn't know that when i began writing. A few years after that, I wrote a non-fiction book because I thought, out of the blue, of Longfellow's long poem "Evangeline" while taking a shower. I made a mental note to remember to find the book. Later that week, I borrowed Longfellow's collected works from the library and then skimmed page after page tll I found the passage I wanted to use as my starting point for the book. It had to do with looking too hard for far-away solutions when help was near at hand. 

Will this help take somebody's mind off their problems?

This is the motivation which benefits me the most, even if this article or story is supposed to be for other people. Fun or interesting or fanciful stories are fun to write. The edits and revisions may turn out to be drudgery, but that first draft is a laugh and a half.

Well, I hope this blog post has left you a bit better off than if you hadn't read it. That was my hope this week, and it will be my hope next week too. 

Garbo

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