How To Accept Your Readers

I wrote in this space recently about the relationship between self-acceptance and publishing acceptance. There is an immediate and almost tangible practicality to the practice of accepting myself – choosing to share the words and scenes and stories in which I am interested, for no other reason than I am interested in those words, scenes, and stories. There is, however, another less tangible and immediate group of people I must also practice accepting, just as regularly, if I hope to have any publishing success – namely, everyone else. I am an author, meaning that unless I am writing in my journal, everything I write is written to be read by other people. While those other people are, thankfully, not in the room with me while I’m writing, I have occasionally gotten out of the house over the last fifty years, and whenever I do, I meet some of these folks and notice that each of them has their own idea about what is funny and what is not, and what is cool and what is not, and what is sexy and what is not. In other words, everyone has their own imagination, which is the final destination of everything conceived within my imagination.

As soon as I shared one thing I’d written with one other person, even someone I knew very well, I noticed this strange phenomenon: what I wrote and what they read were not precisely the same thing. Within the sanctity of their own imaginations, my readers ignored details I considered important while focusing on those I considered trivial. Readers would hate characters I loved and love characters I hated. No matter how carefully I crafted my story, no matter how many drafts I wrote or editors I hired, readers continued committing the unfortunate mistake of making up their own minds about what my story meant.

I had not understood, until I began sharing my work regularly, how much this difference between what I thought I had written and what my readers read had served as a quiet impediment to getting published. As a writer, I considered being misunderstood a kind of failure. Strangely, my job is not to be understood. My job is to write as clearly and honestly as I can, and then allow the reader to take whatever they need most from what I have written.

But to do so I must accept that everyone is on an equally important journey, and that everyone is their own best guide toward where they are going. This is not always so easy for me to accept. Sometimes as I go about my day, I see or meet people doing or saying things that make no sense to me. It is tempting at such times to think, “What is wrong with them that they would do that?” or, “What is wrong with me that I don’t understand them?”

The answer in both cases is always “Nothing,” but to accept that answer I must trust in something I cannot immediately perceive. Fortunately, I do this all the time. I cannot perceive the success of a story while I am writing it. All I know is that I want to write it. On most days, that is enough. I trust that what I want for that story will come. It will come in the form of other people finding it, guided to the story by precisely the same means I wrote it.