Recently a friend commented that she didn’t like eBooks
because she couldn’t see what other people were reading when she rode the
subway or stopped in a coffee shop. She was curious about who was reading what.
I know how she feels.
We can no longer look at a stranger holding a book and be
intrigued, surprised, or smugly satisfied at making the right guess about what
the other person is reading. I once sat behind a woman on the subway reading a
book I had ghost-written. Although I was dying to ask her what she thought of
it, I held back. Reading in public is still a private act. Now, with the spread
of e-Readers, books have become anonymous. It’s as if the entire world walked
around with books in plain brown wrapping paper.
One of the reasons I like being able to see who is reading
what is the way it challenges assumptions. Most of the people I see holding
physical books are not the author’s “ideal reader” for that book. The title of
choice at once expands the assumptions we make about someone else, about the
man dressed like a banker reading a history of the Navajos, or the woman in
sneakers half-watching her kids at the playground and half reading a biography
of John J. Audubon.
The concept of the ideal reader has been around since the
first storytellers looked around the campfire and directed their tale to the
most eager member of the audience. According to Dr. L. Kip Wheeler of the
website Literary Vocabulary, the ideal reader is the person who would, ideally,“understand every phrase, word, and
allusion in a literary work, and who would completely understand the literary
experience an author presents, and then responds emotionally as the writer
wished.”
Stephen King has said his wife,
Tabitha, is his ideal reader. He shows everything to her first. John Updike
picked a location for the teenage boy he expected to be reading his stories. “When I write, I
aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east
of Kansas,” he said in Writers
at Work (edited by George Plimpton,
1976).
Some writers suggest the ideal reader
should be specific, and one website (www.draft2digital.com) offers a list of
details to fill in, to create the person a writer imagines reading her work.
The list includes such features as name, gender, age, education, occupation,
marital and family status, and much more. The intention is to recognize that
the ideal reader is a specific person, a character, which must be fleshed out
in great detail. I confess to never having
done anything so detailed, and I’m not sure I could pick my ideal reader out of
a crowd.
For me, the ideal reader is
someone who isn’t in a hurry, and settles down to read. She is female and reads
widely. She is definitely not pretentious, but she is satisfied with herself
and thoughtful. I can’t say where she lives because, thanks to the miracle of
the Internet, I have found readers in the most unexpected places. That means
that I’ve found readers outside New England.
Now I’m wondering about other
writers’ ideal readers. Do you have an ideal reader? When did you come to know
who this is? Did you create this person or make a discovery while you were
writing?
