I chuckled at Mark Baker’s recent post where he surmised that The Reader is the Enemy because I agreed that the cues he listed all do seem so damning (haven’t we all said or heard, “grab the reader” and “hold their attention”?).
While Mark reminds writers how we often speak of readers as enemies, there’s the comic strip character Pogo reminding us, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” And that’s a good thing because we ought to be self-policing our own work, being as critical about our craft as we presume our reader enemies to be, testing our products in their shoes, if that were at all possible. When we fail to empathize with our readers, we fail them. But there is more than this behind the tension between writers and readers.
