What Readers Really Want

“And so,” he said, “in the end, what must we determine? Is it the intellect of a genius that we revere? If it were their artistry, the beauty of their mind, would we not laud it regardless of whether we’d seen their product before?

“But we don’t. Given two works of artistic majesty, otherwise weighted equally, we will give greater acclaim to the one who did it first. It doesn’t matter what you create. It matters what you create before anyone else.

“So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect. It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself. The greatest talent that we think a man can have?” He plucked one final string. “Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.”

—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

As much as we write for the love of storytelling, most of us also want our writing to be popular. We try to write what people want to read, what's popular, or what speaks to the current moment. The publishing industry compounds this, publishing something people really like, and then—whether serendipitously or to cash in on a trend—they publish a bunch of other things like it.

That's not to say follow-ups are all clones. They are often very good on their own! But the sameness of a genre can wear out the audience, and eventually, a lot of readers no longer want to read stories about, for example, dystopian YA or magical schools. (More's the pity.)

We can't control the publishing industry, but we can control what we write. We can't know what will sell, but we know what people want. They want to be surprised and delighted and entertained, and the way to do that—just as Brandon Sanderson's character Wit points out above—is to give them something new.

Readers get bored when they can predict what will happen or when they feel like they've seen something before, but we love novelty.

And there's nothing in this world more novel than you.

I do think it's important to be aware of trends, and it's no good trying to avoid all the tropes (it can't be done), but the most important thing is to write something you like and to infuse it with your unique heart, voice, and experiences.

Because whether they know it or not yet, that is what readers really want.

Injecting Emotion

Most writers don't think of ourselves as actors, but we are a little bit. We have to imagine what our characters are feeling and then portray it. It's just that writers portray it slowly on the page (and revised over time) rather than in the moment with our voices and bodies. It's a different medium, but the goal is the same: to connect with the audience, to make them feel what we feel.

I've talked before about using description to convey emotion. Among other things, I said, "Think about what's happening in the scene—what can be seen, heard, felt, smelled, or even tasted. Then, think about what the characters are feeling and use that to color what is described and how."

Let's go a bit beyond that. What if you didn't just think about what your characters are feeling? What if you felt it too?

Of course, every writer's process is different, but it's likely you're already doing this—at least sometimes. You may have become sad when you had to kill a character or gotten angry at something your villain did. That's what this is. All you gotta do then is use it.

Take those emotions and describe them: what your body feels or how your feelings color the world around you. Your description doesn't have to be perfect (it's not gonna be—it's a first draft!), but there will be gems in there. More importantly, that initial description will help you feel those feelings again when you revise, so you can fine tune it to better describe what you were feeling at the time.

Right, but... How?

Some people struggle with feeling these emotions. I certainly did. For most of my life, I considered emotions untrustworthy, something to be avoided. That belief led me to shunt my emotions down until I didn't feel them anymore. (Or rather, I thought I wasn't feeling them. In truth, I didn't recognize them for what they were, but they created all kinds of stress and anxiety, among other things. But that's a whole other post...)

If this resonates with you too, here are some tips that might help you tap into your characters' emotions better, thus helping your readers do the same.

Act out the scene. Put yourself in your characters' shoes, not just in your head but physically. (If you have a willing friend, act it out with them—maybe even talk about what both of you are feeling afterward.)

Draw from your experiences. Maybe you've never had to flee from a deadly assassin or walked through a haunted wood, but you have been scared. Think about times you felt something like what your characters are feeling and put yourself back in that situation. What did it feel like? What was going on with your body? Can you feel those feelings again?

Learn from the acting world. Actors have to be in touch with their emotions, and we can learn a lot from them. I'm not saying take acting lessons or join a troupe (though those would certainly help improve your writing!), but maybe read some articles about acting or improv. Learn about what actors do that we don't normally think of.

Play D&D or other tabletop RPGs. Tabletop RPGs are a fantastic and relatively safe way to practice putting yourself in someone else's head. Granted, most TTRPG groups aren't going to deep-dive into emotional acting, but they are an entertaining way to imagine what someone who is not you might feel or do in situations you've never been in. (It can also be another method to practice a bit of improv!)

Do some inner work. I'm not suggesting you seek counseling to become a better writer, but if you're struggling with emotions—whether your own real-life emotions or feeling the imagined ones of your characters—maybe process why that is. Emotions are a normal and vital part of being human (and a critical part of writing). It's well worth exploring our own issues with them.

Again, every writer has their own process. It might be that none of this is for you, and that's fine. But if you're seeking to better connect readers with your characters, I hope you can find something useful here.

How to Write in Dark Times

It is objectively difficult to create when it feels like the world, including the networks and structures we take for granted, is crumbling around us—even more so when it actually is. But art in all forms is a critical kind of resistance and reconstruction, and it's one way we can actually help.

But what the heck do you write about when everything is terrible?

Thankfully, we're not the first to experience this. Writers have been writing in dark times for as long as there have been times. Stories didn't stop being told just because there were world wars, global depressions, or raging pandemics. In fact, many of our best stories were created from those times.

With that in mind, here are some of the reasons I and others continue to write.

To Give People Hope

A story can give people hope that the darkness can be beaten, that even the smallest person and the smallest act can matter. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien drew on (among other things) his experiences in World War I to write The Lord of the Rings, even as he lived through the build-up toward World War II.

Stories can give people hope for a better future, like Susan Kaye Quinn's Nothing Is Promised hopepunk series, written amidst the ever-present doom of our climate crisis yet presenting a vision of what humanity is capable of.

To Give People Inspiration

The darkness can be beaten, but how do we beat it? Your story might address this more directly, presenting a dystopian world and the hard-pressed, reluctant heroes who tear it down—for example, Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire, Lois Lowry's The Giver, or Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. It's fiction, yes, and not an instruction manual, but stories like these can be the seeds for real-world ideas (or in some cases, real-world warnings).

To Shine a Light on the Truth

Many stories, especially those by authors from underrepresented or oppressed groups, reveal truths that majority culture is often blind to. These are the kinds of stories that can change someone's entire worldview, and humanity needs as many as we can get.

R.F. Kuang's Babel takes a scathing look at the former British Empire and the cultures that were crushed to create it. It raises critical questions of whether an invincible power can be fought at all and, if so, how—all while telling a gripping historical fantasy tale.

Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts paints a vision of a terrifying America-that-could-be (one that feels increasingly real in today's political climate) and asks the reader to consider how such a thing could have happened and what they might do within it.

To Increase Empathy

Not all stories need to touch on dystopia to make a difference. Every story is an exercise in empathy, especially the most personal ones, and empathy is critical to pull us out of the darkness.

In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng writes about a town that believes itself to be uplifted yet struggles when faced with its own underlying biases. There is no great villain nor power to be toppled in this story, but it nonetheless forces us to empathize and wrestle with multiple perspectives on difficult moral questions.

(Honestly, all of Celeste Ng's work is amazing. I can't recommend her enough.)

To Provide an Escape

Not all stories need to inspire or teach or represent. A story that is merely an escape is every bit as vital during dark times. When every headline feels worse than the one before, despair comes all too easily. But despair is how the darkness wins. In a fight like that, joy and escape become lifelines and weapons.

My examples, of course, are from my own interests—what I have read and remember (hence all the sci-fi and fantasy). But there are so many good examples I am omitting here. Please, recommend your own stories-from-dark-times in the comments. We want to read them!

I Have to Rewrite the Whole Thing?!

They say you have to murder your darlings, and you think, sure, I get that—a phrase here, a sentence there... But what if the feedback is that a whole scene isn't working? Or a whole chapter? What if you're asked to add or remove an entire character or, God forbid, rewrite the entire novel?

Why would you even consider that? There are lots of possible reasons. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• A chapter isn't working and needs to be cut entirely or replaced with something else.
• You removed an entire character and need to rewrite whole chapters or scenes.
• A hard drive crash caused you to lose a huge chunk of work.
• After finishing a first draft, you realize you love the world and characters, but the plot isn't working at all.
• You returned to an old draft after several years and want to update it with everything you've learned.

Rewriting something you've already written feels bad, hard, impossible. It took so much work to get those words there in the first place—why would you want to do it again?

Let me reassure you that, while it does feel scary, a rewrite is never as bad as you think it will be for one simple reason:

You already did it once.

What's hard about writing something the first time is that you don't know what will happen or who the characters are or how to say what you want to say. But after having written it once, a lot of this mental work is already done! And if you've lost work and are just trying to redo it, it's even easier. You don't have to think about changing anything—you can just try to remember what happened and write it as though you had outlined it already.

The fear of rewriting largely comes from this unexamined idea we have that what we wrote the first time was good, and we're afraid we won't be able to replicate it again. But you absolutely can.

You did it once. You can do it again.

What's even better, the act of a rewrite allows you to improve what you had written, because you're not starting from scratch. You have a foundation to work from—even if it's just in your head—and you can actively improve on that foundation as you rewrite.

Most of the time, doing a rewrite is optional. But if you're willing to try, you can find great freedom and flexibility in your story. You'll discover what I said in a previous post: that your novel is always soft and malleable. And when you've finished, you'll often find that you love the new version more than you ever loved the original...

...you know, the one you thought you could never recreate.

Perhaps most importantly, you'll begin to learn to trust yourself—your skill, craft, and experience. And that is where the really good writers are born.

Seeing What the Reader Sees

One of the hardest but most important aspects of editing your own work is reading it with fresh eyes. You can (and should!) do this with beta readers or by hiring an editor, but being able to do it yourself is so, so valuable.

But how the heck do you do that? After all, when you're reading your own work, you not only know what's going to happen but also what might happen, what never happened, and what happened once in an old version like seven revisions ago!

You have to get out of your head. You have to read your own work as though it were the first time you've ever seen it. You know nothing that isn't on the page! It's not easy, but here are some tips to make it possible.

TAKE A BREAK. This is probably the most common advice. Step away from what you wrote for a while—days, maybe weeks or even months if you can. When you come back to it, you might have forgotten parts, but more importantly, your brain will have the opportunity to approach it like a new thing. That feeling won't last through the whole novel, but hold on to it as long as you can. Also...

TAKE NOTES. As you read your novel with fresh eyes, write down facts and details—especially things that you know have changed from outline to draft or from revision to revision. But—and this is the most important thing—you cannot write down anything that is not on the page! Write down what you see, not what you think you see.

PRACTICE. Believe it or not, seeing a familiar document from a fresh reader's perspective is a skill you can improve at. How do I know? It's literally my job. The more you do it, the easier it will be to see a manuscript the way a new reader would see it, setting aside all the extra information floating around in your head.

This is a very important skill for writers to learn. Beta readers are amazing, and a good editor is well worth the money, but you are the only person in the world who fully understands your intent and your vision. If you can maintain both readers in your head at once—one who has never read this before and the other who knows what you want it to become—you can do anything.