Haydn Shaughnessy's Blog - Posts Tagged "readeer"
The Ideal Reader
There are plenty of blog posts on writing. In fact I wrote a few myself during my time at Forbes. What about reading?
I imagine there to be an ideal reader. Across the planet there must be a few thousand people who would fit my description of her or him. They are what writers like me are looking for.
The first attribute of my ideal reader is Impatient curiosity, someone with a sense that the stories they are hearing around them right now are not quite right.
The second attribute would be a desire to form or change an opinion. I cannot imagine it is worth reading my books to get confirmation of what you already know. The desire for a change must burn pretty bright, which means the perfect reader will be thinking through many issues beside the ones I raise.
Patience and open mindedness don't go together very well yet a good reader has to be open minded as well as being bloody minded. That person will let go of treasured assumptions reluctantly, only after a fight, but they will complete the act of letting go as they wrestle with new information.
Finally the perfect reader will be in awe of information. There is so much we don't know and there are so many stories where the appearance of reason has been patched together that in the end the good reading experience is to know information is over-abundant and to be happy to see some of it make sense.
I imagine there to be an ideal reader. Across the planet there must be a few thousand people who would fit my description of her or him. They are what writers like me are looking for.
The first attribute of my ideal reader is Impatient curiosity, someone with a sense that the stories they are hearing around them right now are not quite right.
The second attribute would be a desire to form or change an opinion. I cannot imagine it is worth reading my books to get confirmation of what you already know. The desire for a change must burn pretty bright, which means the perfect reader will be thinking through many issues beside the ones I raise.
Patience and open mindedness don't go together very well yet a good reader has to be open minded as well as being bloody minded. That person will let go of treasured assumptions reluctantly, only after a fight, but they will complete the act of letting go as they wrestle with new information.
Finally the perfect reader will be in awe of information. There is so much we don't know and there are so many stories where the appearance of reason has been patched together that in the end the good reading experience is to know information is over-abundant and to be happy to see some of it make sense.
