Dear Reader
“Dear reader …”
By sundown, the campus had emptied of students and staff. I remained behind in my office with Susan, one of my graduates, musing about the acts of imagination that fuel the writing process. I recalled the nineteenth-century practice of directly addressing a “dear reader,” which underscores an important fact. Writing a book is writing for someone, millions of “someones” when the author is fortunate, which makes writing an act of love. How the author imagines that reader is crucially important.
The office window was open to the warm night air. We grew quiet, listening to the intermittent crackle of crickets that gradually became a steadier drone. Each evening, when the orange sky resolved to turquoise and purple, the grounds of our college came alive with different life, as though the creatures had been waiting all day for just this moment. I often lingered, listening to them. Susan seemed to relish the evening mood, too. The long pauses in our conversation contributed to our thoughtfulness as the dancer is inspired by momentary stillness.
“Two things, two principles I guess you’d call them, guide my writing,” I finally said, in answer to Susan’s query. “The first is respect for my audience, my belief in their intelligence, curiosity, and discrimination. I imagine this reader—not someone dull-witted or easily impressed—because it is more interesting. I imagine this reader because writing is a dialogue between me and my reader long before the work is published.
One of Susan’s eyebrows lifted as the corners of her mouth curled upward in a knowing grin. “Who wouldn’t prefer a lively conversation to a lethargic one?”
“Exactly.”
Susan and I had wrestled with ideas together many a time, enjoying the fire of two minds fully engaged. “You know Ursula Le Guin?” I asked. At Susan’s puzzled look, I described a marvelous collection of Le Guin’s essays, Dancing at the Edge of the World, in which she asserts that only the reader can complete a writer’s vision: “Indeed,” Le Guin writes, “I may have to make an act of faith and declare that they will exist, those unknown, perhaps unborn people, my dear readers.”
There it is, that phrase: my dear readers.
The imagined reader is crucial to the author’s craft. If we want our work to endure, we are obligated to imagine our readers and gladly take responsibility for our impact on them. For instance, do we want to provoke or seduce? Is our intention to disturb or entertain? Yes, our gaze is drawn to the center of the page—which, for a really preoccupied writer, momentarily becomes the center of the cosmos—but the reader hovers around the edges, continually shaping the work.
“So those nineteenth-century novelists had it right?” Susan asked. “You know, ‘Dear Reader…’ and all that?”
“Well, yes, in a way.” Directly addressing the dear reader, a trope attributed to Charlotte Bronte, tells a truth. “I do speak to her, or him, or them, my dear readers. Because until they are genuinely dear to me, I cannot speak at all.”
I paused, listening to the echo of my statement, testing its truth. I had been writing for 40 years, so the simplicity of this clear assertion surprised me. Yes, the dear reader, whom I may never meet but whose heart, mind, and soul I long to touch.
My attention was drawn again to the purpling sky beyond the open window, and the cooling air, and the lingering scent of Eucalyptus. And I remembered something James Hillman once said. “To speak, to ask to have an audience today in the world, requires us to speak to the world, for the world is in the audience, it too is listening to what we say.”
“What’s the second thing?” Susan asked.