Amy Sue Nathan

Writing like a reader and reading like a writer

One of the best decisions I made recently was to beg ask J to be a beta reader.  You know why?  Because she’s not a writer and because she and I have been online friends since the inception of my very first blog but we don’t know each other outside the blogosphere.  While I have no doubt we’d chat for hours and find we’re compatible, we’ve not had the opportunity to do so…yet.   Not only do I go to J’s blog any time I want to find a recipe I know I’ll like, but I love reading her thorough, thoughtful, honest book reviews.  Therefore I thought she had all the ingredients to be the beta I needed because I just wanted someone to read it as a reader – not as an editor or writer (although she did heed my warning that there were errors in the ms and she caught a-plenty, for which I am grateful).

And, while my betas and my CP rock, they read like writers, which is different from the entire normal universe you should know.

I read for language and story.  I want meticulously crafted prose.  I’m no pretend literary snob, I’ll read just about anything because any genre can be well written within it’s own parameters.  I also want story. I want a beginning, middle and end.  I want a plot.  I want characters.  I want setting.  I gauge pace as I read and my mind counts redundancies and dangling participles.  I can and do like books that have glaring flaws – but overall I want a well-told story that uses words in a very special way.  Not in a snooty way; not in a keep-the-dictionary-next-to-me way; not always in an academic or literary way — just in a way that means a special combination of the right wordsevoke vivid images and palpable emotions to go along with the story.

I reasoned recently that if I read like a writer it might behoove me to write like a reader.  And then it hit me – yes – if I write and look at it from a non-writer’s point of view it helps me stay grounded.  It allows me consider what a reader would want to know, what she would think.  I factor in the holes she might fall through as she reads and what might take her by surprise.  It’s a fine line between writing for writers and writing for readers, but it’s there.

It’s an exercise in multiple-writer-personalities I think, shifting focus, looking at the same work right-side-up and upside-down.  It’s putting on the writer hat so that work passes all the tests that will help open the publishing padlock while keeping in mind that most readers don’t write more than grocery lists.

If you’re a writer have you discussed a book with a non-writer?  It’s fascinating — and totally different than discussing a book with a writer.  And I think it’s really necessary to keep our keyboard tapping fingers on the pulse of the reading public.

Then, of course, I go back to writing like a writer — which is how we give readers what they need to just read.