Collaborating With Your Reader

How to create the scaffolding readers need to enter your story.

- By Peter Mountford

Here’s a pet theory: A book never read is, by definition, incomplete.

This sounds like a philosophical problem—a book falls in the woods ...

Writing is a collaborative art form between writer and reader. The writing itself is just words on pages. It’s not a finished experience. The reader uses their own imagination to complete this process. The story almost literally comes alive within their mind. This is why we, as readers, become attached to characters—we feel they're now part of our lives.

It’s a kind of magic trick. But crucially, we're not casting a spell over our reader. We're helping them cast a spell over themselves.

The snag is—and this is why writing requires skill—if we don’t provide our reader with the right stuff (pick your metaphor: scaffolding or ingredients for this spell), they can’t do their part of the collaboration. Just because you, the writer, can see what’s going on in your head, doesn’t mean that your reader can. Readers easily get confused, are unable to picture situations, can’t understand the characters, and ultimately feel nothing.

Anticipating your reader's experience, moment by moment, as they move through your sentences is crucial. You have to know what exactly they will need and when they need it. This is, no exaggeration, the most important skill for a writer.

This might sound daunting, but it’s not. How do we, as writers, help our readers in this magical process? Here are some ground rules I use to help my students and coaching clients.

The Physical World Is Hard to Guess

Writers often want to create a cinematic experience for their readers, but what they end up writing is similar to a screenplay (lots of dialogue, not a lot of setting). However, if you've ever read a screenplay, you know reading a script is not actually similar to watching a movie. Which is why people don't often buy screenplays, but they do like to watch TV shows and movies.