Well, I thought that I’d talk about writing and ignoring the reader today. This article will mostly be written from a reader’s perspective since, whilst I do have some formal training in creative writing (and still mess around with it sometimes), I probably have more experience with reading fiction than writing it. And I had two experiences which lessened some anxieties I had about the idea of ever publishing anything.
The first was, shortly after reading and reviewing Christopher Golden’s fun 2024 horror novel “The House Of Last Resort” – a solid “4/5” in my book – having the random instinct to go onto Goodreads and see what other readers thought of it. For some bizarre reason, I then felt compelled to look at the low 1-2 star reviews for it. Whilst some of the criticisms of the novel vaguely made sense, some were just laugh-out-loud funny to read.
There were readers complaining loudly about what a character was – or wasn’t – wearing during one brief scene in the book… where there are much more interesting things happening. There were readers moaning about – clearly unlikeable – characters being unlikeable. There were readers solemnly incanting the tired old “Show, don’t tell” saying (Seriously, novels aren’t movies! It’s ok to “tell” sometimes. I certainly didn’t have an issue with it when reading the book...). And it was weirdly compelling and amusing to read all of these bad reviews of a novel I thought was actually fairly good. An opinion which seems to be fairly common, given that the majority of reviews on the site were in the 3-4 star range.
But it made me realise that it’s almost impossible to second-guess what readers will think. For context, this is a modern traditionally-published novel from an experienced professional author. It probably went past a professional editor and all of that. And, yet there was still a small segment of the audience who had all sorts of random criticisms to make.
The other experience was – ironically – when I noticed a small error in the book I started reading afterwards. The novel in question is Lilith Saintcrow’s badass 2008 urban fantasy novel “Hunter’s Prayer”. This is a gloriously “mid-late 2000s” type novel, with cool leather trench-coats, a gothic demon nightclub and a “Plus I can handle the recoil, since I’m much stronger than your average girl” type main character called Jill. And that’s just the opening chapter. It’s a thrilling, stylised fast-paced “because its cool” edgy gothic hardboiled paranormal detective-action novel, which could only have come from between about 1999-2009 🙂
But, whilst reading the opening chapter – in the 2008 Orbit (UK) paperback edition – I noticed a brief error with Jill’s gun. She mentions that it is a specific real-world brand of pistol (which rhymes with “clock”). If you’ve ever watched action movies, seen a US detective TV show or played a “realistic” action genre videogame, you probably know what one of these pistols looks like… and that it does not have a revolver-style hammer sticking out of the back of it. Yet “I thumbed the hammer back with a solid click” in the opening chapter.
Did this ruin my enjoyment of the novel? No, it is still a really cool novel. A fun piece of mid-late 2000s nostalgia – in a vaguely similar tradition to Jocelynn Drake’s excellent “Nightwalker” (2008) – from the days when the popular version of the fantasy genre was edgy gothic urban fantasy, rather than “romantasy”.
Whilst it obviously makes sense not to alienate the majority of your readership, and to avoid as many errors as possible, I think that it’s also important not to obsess about the tiny fraction of readers who will always take issue with something in a story. Again, for all of the 1-2 star reviews I read about a novel I enjoyed, the majority of readers – like myself – thought that it was at least fairly good. Likewise, although I had a bit of a laugh about the error with the main character’s gun in the other novel, I still kept reading… because the rest of the story was compelling.
If you’re a writer, then you’re probably also a reader as well. In fact, whilst there is value to formal writing training, getting actual experience as a reader is – in some ways – more important. Your audience, or the majority of your audience, probably isn’t that different to you in this regard. If you enjoy reading something, then at least a portion of your audience will as well. Yes, there will probably always be “haters”, but if most of your audience enjoys what you are writing, then this really doesn’t matter too much.
Or, failing all of this, just follow the old pulp writing thing of “never be boring”. If your story is atmospheric, cool, badass, thrilling, fast-paced etc… enough then readers are a lot more likely to forgive occasional errors or criticisms, because they’re more interested in everything else that is going on.
Again, you should try to avoid errors whenever possible but the whole perfectionist thing of “If literally every reader doesn’t think that this is a flawless masterpiece, then I’ve failed” is the sort of attitude that just leads to anxiety and/or writer’s block. It’s ok that not every reader likes your story, and it isn’t the end of the world if a small number of readers really criticise a single moment or element of it. At the end of the day, the important thing is that most readers like, enjoy or are at least entertained by your story.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
