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14 What Reader Do You Have in Mind?
“When you begin to write, have a reader in mind.”
Writers have handed that old saw down from one generation to the next. But what good does it do to have a reader in mind?
Having a reader in mind means finding common ground with your reader. It helps you choose what—of the ten thousand people, places, things, thoughts, and feelings you know—to write about for that reader.
When she was in her sixties, Nora Foster wrote a little book as a gift to her granddaughters, the twins she had helped to raise. Nora was born in 1858 in a little town in Iowa, just ten years after the town was first settled.
For her granddaughters, Nora wrote about how it felt to sleep in a trundle bed beneath the rope bed that held her enormous parents—
her father weighed almost 300 pounds, and her mother more than 240.
When they would turn over, she said, the bed would squeak a tune.
Nora wrote about a great feast when her brother and his comrades returned from the Civil War. She wrote about music, flags, the deaths of a brother and sister, and about her own grandmother, who had helped raise her, sitting quietly and reading the Bible on the Sabbath.
Nora Foster wrote her little book for a readership of two, and to find common ground with those two grandchildren, she wrote what she remembered from her own childhood, when her eyes were wide open to a new world.
Some events—the Civil War, the Great Depression, 9/11—transfig-ure the whole world, and millions of people are hungry to read the stories of those who experienced them directly.
One such event occurred on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, when Japanese fighter planes attacked the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
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Robert Hudson had an intimate view of the attack. He wrote a mem-oir that was published in a book of Pearl Harbor reminiscences. As Hudson remembered,
a plane came directly at us . . . flying only about fifty feet above the water. Between the plane and the Oglala was a motor launch, returning people to their ships from liberty and church services.
They looked up at the plane and all dove overboard. The launch raced on madly, without anyone in control. . . . The plane then dropped a torpedo straight for us. The plane’s cockpit was open, and the pilot was hanging his head over the side to look at us. On his approach, we saw red flashes from his wings. I thought it was a drill and that the flashes were from a camera. . . . When bullets started ricocheting off the bulkhead around us, I knew the plane was not there to take our picture. . . . I ran to my battle station on the forecastle, a round chalk mark where a fifty-caliber machine gun was to be installed sometime in the future. . . . Men dashed about madly, crying and cursing. Planes were dropping torpedoes and bombs and strafing everything in sight. . . . I did exactly what I had been told to do. I stood on that goddamn chalk circle until ordered to do something else. . . . It was truly a nightmare to see shipmates . . . throwing potatoes and wrenches at low-flying planes (Paul Joseph Travers, Eyewitness to Infamy: An Oral History of Pearl Harbor [Lanham md: Madison Books, 1991], 159–63).
Admirals, navy wives, and Japanese pilots, as well as sailors such as Robert Hudson, have written their memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor, each person writing what he or she knows.
No two of these reminiscences are exactly alike.
When you are writing for a large readership interested in one earth-shaking event, as Robert Hudson was, having a reader in mind, and finding common ground, means thinking about what that reader al-ready knows that you needn’t say, and what that reader does not know.
Robert Hudson could assume that his reader, interested in Pearl Harbor, would know what a bulkhead, a minesweeper, a battle station, a fifty-caliber machine gun, a motor launch, and liberty are. He could use all those terms without explaining them.
What Reader Do You Have in Mind? 59
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thought, and felt, and what he did. Standing in a chalk circle await-ing further orders and seeawait-ing sailors throwawait-ing potatoes at attackawait-ing planes—those are Hudson’s own experiences, which his readers would want him to describe as vividly and intimately as he could.
What do you know that a perfect stranger will find compelling? You may never have been involved in an earth-shaking event, and yet a stranger may be intrigued by some arresting details of your life—the trundle bed, the sailors throwing potatoes at attacking airplanes—and it’s in those telling details that you and the stranger find common ground.
How you evoke those experiences, what you feel and think about them, and how you express your thoughts and feelings, may also be the elements that keep your readers reading.
There are as many ways of telling a story as there are stories to tell, and your way will be unique. It’s largely a matter of style, a matter of taste.
Dave Eggers achieved a sort of cockeyed fame with a memoir that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks and sold more than two hundred thousand copies, a book he had the temerity to call A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It’s a hard act to follow.
Eggers’s story is indeed heartbreaking. It’s the story of how Eggers and his older brother and sister, all in their twenties, collaborated to raise their seven-year-old brother after their parents’ sudden death. If Eggers has the license to call his book a work of staggering genius, it’s because of the way he tells his story. What captures his readers’ attention is what Eggers thinks, and how he feels, about his situation—and how he expresses his thoughts and feelings. By turns bitter and joyous, candid and disingenuous, Eggers takes his readers on a journey of grieving and of coming to terms with his life and his memories.
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