Readers are fundamental to what we do. Without them there would be little reason to spend the long hours propped up to a key board pounding out the words that make a story. It is the words that make a story not the brainstorm that created the concept. So with that in mind I have a question. Do you take care of your readers? I don’t mean do you house and feed them, I am really asking if you actually write for your readers? In writing for your readers do you do everything possible to make certain they are okay as they read what you have written?

You can’t query your readers as they move through your book (unlike the old high school smart assed trick on a long report, “if you have read this far check the box.”) so you must think ahead about pleasing them. How do we do that? (BTW Thanks for asking) Here are five simple things to think about and try as you are writing:

• Think about your reader as a real person sitting in the room with you and you are reading your story to them. This will allow you to have personal contact with the reader and if you are a good writer you will be able to detect questions that your reader might have about what you have written.
• Don’t leave your reader in the dark about some key points of plot that will help them come to some resolution about what you intended in the story. Nothing is more discouraging for a reader than to have invested their time in a story only to wonder what happened in the end. This can be as simple as a question about the rationale for character actions or as complex as a plot twist that comes out of left field with no preparation.
• Think of some of the habits of your reader. If you are writing in a particular genre and that genre has some fast rules, your reader will not expect deviations from those rules. You as an artist may want to deviate from these rules to demonstrate your multi-dimensional talent, but your reader may be left in the dust of the experiment. If there is a question about artistic freedom and genre conventions you should side with the reader. There are a number of break out genres that the reader expects rebelliousness. This would be the more proper place for your grand statement.
• Try to understand the demographics of your reader. In this way you can keep your story true to form. Age, sex, income and education all make up who your readers are in life. If your readers are highly educated and more affluent then you can use more sophisticated sentence and plot structures. If your reader is more like the population norm then the writing style should be geared to be most understood by the largest number. You may have the desire to use your story as an educational tool or literary statement, but if your readership cannot understand what you have written, you may lose the interest of a wide segment of readers doing so.
• Think about how your readers live and what they want to think about when reading your story. Doing this will allow you to create some amazing scenes that may actually carry your reader away from the mundane and into the special world you have created. In this special world, all the worries and concerns of your reader’s everyday life can be washed away for the time spent reading. If you are able to build a story that transforms the reader even for a few hours you will have won the reader over to a loyalty factor that will last a lifetime.

I hope you find these tips useful. Let me know what you think.