Elizabeth Gilbert uses a specific strategy when working on a project: she settles upon one of her close friends as the intended reader of her work. For each project, she selects a different friend, someone whose unique personality somehow fits with the topic or could be sympathetic to the whole endeavor. She wants every element of the work to touch this person, somehow.
I take a little bit of a different angle. For each project that I am working on, I invent my own ideal reader. I do my very best to inject a fulsome quality to this invention. I want to make this reader real to me. Any incidental detail has value.
I always place the ideal reader in some far-flung locale, at a distance from where I write. This approach forces me to elucidate the world that I am either explaining or creating. I find that this invented relationship allows for clarity to enter onto the creative landscape. Be clear. This quality is of the upmost importance. The only thing that a recipient of your creation will know is what you tell them.
As an example, for the memoir that I am working on, I conjured up Helene. Helene lives in the city of Tours, just a couple of hours south of Paris. She is reading my memoir in translation. She is a busy mother of three, so she doesn’t have a lot of undivided time. She digests just snatches of my tale whenever she has the chance. Her favorite place to escape to – in order to get some distance from everyday life – is a park in the city center. It is well-manicured, with box-tree hedges outlining the paths which circumambulate around a pond in the very center. Within the pond is an island that Helene always pauses to look at – she wants to catch sight of the pair of swans which make their nest there every spring.
This is where Helene reads my book. On a wrought iron bench looking over the pond. She is an avid swimmer and tries to get to the pool at the public recreation center at least twice a week. She is always drawn to water.
Helene is worried about her brother. He suffers from mental health issues. He lives with her parents, in the family farmhouse in a village at the edge of the Loire Valley. She realizes that her parents have little sympathy for her brother’s struggles. Their patience is wearing thin. She wants to help him, but she has her own life in town, an hour away from the farmhouse . . .
Helene forces me to be clear. Placing her in a remote location, with an entirely different worldview, demands that I have to thoroughly immerse myself in the world that I am conveying. I have to be detailed and specific. The everyday minutia of my book’s world cannot be assumed.
Whether you take Gilbert’s approach or my own, I encourage you to find an ideal reader for your creative endeavor. The process of creation becomes much more focused. It also squelches the specter of the inner critic, who can toss even the most beautiful passage or stroke of the brush down the cliff of doubt. Invent this ideal reader for yourself.
