The Problem with "Trust Your Reader"

There’s a common adage in writing you probably have heard: trust your reader. We are to assume our reader can and will find the pieces we’ve created and puzzle out our meanings.

This isn’t just a refrain you see in craft books and reddit threads, either. It was often used in my MFA classes, too. Sometimes, it was a veiled critique, like, “I really like how you trust your reader here, but this needs a bit more explanation…” Other times, it came out as an exhortation: “I think you can cut some of this exposition and trust your reader to figure it out.”

I dutifully noted the advice when it came my way and occasionally offered it myself or used it in a lit class, where we’d praise an author for trusting their brilliant readers (in this case, us). It wasn’t until I’d been out of my MFA program a year that I realized how backward the advice is.

I was knee-deep in editing my first draft of my book. I knew enough to know it needed work. Among many other questions, I wondered about trusting my reader. Was I doing it? Should I be? Did I even know what that would look like?

Concurrently, I found myself chewing on an unrelated comment from one of my professors (the illustrious Courtney Brkic). She’d given the feedback based on a very early draft of a chapter in my thesis that no longer existed. Watch out, she noted, for repetition. Not of words, or even phrases or facts—but places where I was tempted to restate something I’d already said. The danger was that by offering two versions of a thing, one of them invariably works better, seems stronger, is more effective—and that makes the other one less good, weaker.

This is good advice, and I’ll eventually get around to unpacking what it means, because there's a very valuable, practical craft lesson in there (particularly if you write, like I do, largely by rhythm).

In my gut, I felt these two ideas were somehow connected, though I couldn't tell you why, and so they both churned in my mind as I worked, pressing onward, assuming I’d build my wings on the way down. This strategy, by the way—learning while doing—seems to be the only way I’ve ever learned anything about writing. Clarity comes through work, the way neurons link ideas to action often feeling like serendipity instead of science.

Over months of rewriting, I came to see this tendency Courtney noted for myself. I saw descriptions of something being “X and Y” where those two things were really both attempts at saying “Z,” which I also often wrote. I noticed places where in the space of a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, I’d try twice at weaving the same emotion through a character’s dialogue or the same mood through a description. Or I’d find myself hitting an idea too on-the-nose the first time, then with greater nuance the second. I even found whole scenes that seemed to be striking the same chord without adding anything new.

It's possible I started applying the advice more broadly than I was meant to. But as I forced myself to make choices, the book got stronger. And, interestingly, I found myself saying, without even thinking, “That’s clear enough. The reader will get it.”

Trust the reader, I said to myself, in moments of doubt—trust the reader. They’ll be able to do this, even if you don't think so.

And that’s when the lightbulb went off.

It’s not the reader I need to learn to trust at all. It’s myself.

I need to learn that my subtlety is enough. I need to learn that my way of telling the story is effective. I need to trust that I’m a good enough writer to say all the things I want to say in the way I want to say them, and that my ideas will be carried by my words in a way that can reach and become real to a reader I may never know. I need to trust that my first way of saying something works so I won’t feel the need to say it again. I need to believe in my ability to be delicate and deft and also, miraculously, understood.

I need to trust myself.

This is a profoundly different statement, in the end, than being told to trust your reader, and yet it often leads to the same end result. The writing improves, the reader is given the chance to work at interpretation in the way they really, desperately want to (more on this later), and both the storytelling and the relationships we create on and across the page grow richer. What this version of trust accomplishes along the way, though, is really quite different than belief in your unknown readers. Trusting ourselves goes far beyond the work or project in question and becomes a craft lesson for the whole of our creative lives. It’s a lesson that has the power to reshape our approach to our writing in a much more intrinsic way, recasting our relationship with our readers as a partnership of good faith in both directions.

Next time you think of how a book or an author trusted you, think of how that little bit of faith wasn’t an isolated incident, but rather an extension of the author’s practice of faith in themselves. And more importantly, the next time you are making a choice in your work, choose trusting yourself. Do the weirder thing, the one you’re not sure will work, the more subtle one, the one that requires a leap of faith from the person on the other side of the page. Your readers will thank you for it, certainly, but so will the you who is writing tomorrow, or ten years from now, or twenty.

Little by little, you can cultivate deeper confidence in your own words--maybe even in yourself.

And if you don’t feel that confidence right away (because, if you’re like me, you won’t)?

Here’s another free craft lesson for you:

Fake it ‘til you make it. Act like you’re trusting yourself, even if you have to bring the senss of self-doubt with you for the ride, and you may find the feelings just follow along someday.

Resolute

ENGRAVING of the HMS RESOLUTE

When I hear that word, I either think of the desk, the one in the White House, or the ship which lent the desk both its wooden hull and its name. And this is where I’ll start my brand-spankin’-new blog, I guess, by ruminating on a failed arctic expedition, some ruin, a grand resurrection, and a legacy of reinvention. Also, arguably, by success and failure in nearly equal measure. And, oh yeah, also writing fiction. The Resolute desk, which has played host to many of modern America’s most important political moments since it moved to the Oval Office in 1961, was originally a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. From 1880 to 1961, it floated around the White House, only to be rediscovered by Jackie Kennedy during her restoration work as First Lady and put back in its proper place. That’s all fine, but not particularly interesting.

Here's the part I really do find interesting: The oak for the desk was taken from the timbers of the HMS Resolute, a barque-rigged Royal Navy ship outfitted specifically for Arctic explorations. The Resolute launched in 1850 as part of a massive effort to discover the fate of Arctic Explorer John Franklin, whose attempt to find a North West Passage in 1845 ended in silence and mystery (spoiler, he and his entire crew died in 1847).

Long story short (we’re here to talk about writing, after all, not boats…), the Resolute met a fate hardly better than Franklin’s. After a measly four years in service, unsuccessfully searching for the lost voyage, the Resolute became trapped in the arctic ice and was abandoned, left to do whatever ships do in such unfortunate circumstances.

In 1855, an American whaler from Connecticut found the vessel drifting nearly 1,200 miles from where it was last seen, and rescued it. The Resolute was purchased by the American government in 1856, cleaned up, and sailed to England as a gift for Queen Victoria. One can only imagine receiving such a bizarre gift from a foreign government, I suppose—but ever pragmatic, Victoria put the ship back into service, where it never again left home waters before it was retired and scrapped for timber in 1879.

The oak timbers were used to build, among other things, a desk. It weighed a whopping 1,300 pounds, and was sailed back to the United States, because apparently, such tokens of esteem were normal?

In other words, the Resolute had a pretty wild and relatively unsuccessful, disappointing life, and that was before it began serving as the stage for the many notable deeds and misdeeds of twenty four American presidents.

Here are my takeaways:

1)      Early failure does not preclude later success.

2)      Success, likewise, does not always look the way one expects it to.

3)      Boats and desks seem to share a capacity for resurfacing in unlikely places.

4)      If you want to make a lasting impression next Christmas, give someone a 19th century boat.

Seriously, though, I find it fascinating that a ship of middling repute as a sailing vessel found much greater notoriety as a desk. And as a desk, it hasn’t endured in the popular imagination because it’s level (true), strong (true), heavy (true), and huge (true)—in other words, it isn’t notable because it’s a good desk. It’s notable because of the things it has made people feel and the stories it has told. Fine, fine, a bit of a stretch, but hear me out. We remember the Resolute desk for things like FDR having a little door added so that his wheelchair could be hidden beneath it or John Kennedy Jr. playing in the footwell. It’s those stories that have seared themselves into the American consciousness. To say that desk has seen things is to understate the obvious (and maybe it is also to snicker with immature schoolkid glee).

I think if you’re going to make resolutions, you ought to do so knowing you can be resolute and still fail. You can be resolute and succeed in ways you didn’t plan that weren’t even part of your own goals.

This has happened to me, so I should know.

In 2022, I resolved to finish my MFA thesis novel.

I didn’t.

Instead, I finished it 2 months late. Success! Not on anyone’s timeline, of course, and as riddled with problems as I assume the Resolute was when it was found floating aimlessly in the ocean.

In 2023, I resolved to query that same (finished, ha!) novel to agents!

I didn’t!

Instead, I rewrote the manuscript twice, cutting out nearly a full third of what I’d written and completely reworking most of what I’d done before. We’ll talk more about that at a later date, I promise.

So here it is 2024, and it’s tempting to be hopelessly irresolute. Making declarations about what I’m going to do seems a bit pointless after two years of failure. But I’m finally ready to embark on the next part of this expedition, I think. My friend Tim would be pleased to see that his boat metaphor for novel drafts applies in grand fashion to this blog post; he’s already told me that it's time to see if this book is seaworthy.

Neither of us know whether it will float or sink, yet, but hey. The Resolute made better furniture than it did a sailing vessel, so maybe there’s some kind of future out there for this novel no matter what happens. Which is why I’m writing this blog—er, Captain’s Log?—to begin with.

On that note, here’s what I’m going to be up to, and very possibly failing to achieve, in 2024.

PUBLISHING:

Query that novel. I can’t control any other part of the process past that, so that’s the goal, packed with all the hopes and dreams that go along with trying to launch a successful career.

WRITING:

Finish the next book. There’s a fair amount of distance to cover before I’m done. I’m hoping some of the lessons I learned in revising this year (see the post I’m writing about revision!) will make the writing faster.

PROFESSIONAL LIFE:

Build out and launch a website. If you’re reading this, I may have succeeded!

Work on building writing community.

Write a blog (again, if you’re reading this, yay me!). No idea how consistent I’ll be, but I want to be able to start a good repository of my experiences for me and anyone else those stories might help down the road.

I am as resolute as I can be. Certainly resolute enough to be at least a boat-turned-desk kind of writer. Whatever comes next, I’m looking forward to figuring out how to be the best version of that writer I can be.

Note: all my facts came from things I learned in a book about the White House I read as a kid, verified by Wikipedia searching. This isn’t a research essay…I’m just a curious person with a blog.

Other note: Thanks, Tim, for everything. Also: thanks for reading, friend. Welcome aboard.