Below the cut you will find an excerpt from Orson Scott Card's book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. In the excerpt, he outlines his concept of the Wise Reader, what the Wise Reader does, and how the Wise Reader is created. For anyone looking to know more about wise readers or see where the concept originated, it's worth the read.
Creating a Wise Reader
Rare is the writer who actually knows what he's written when it first comes out on paper. A passage you think is clear won't be. A character you think is fascinating will bore other people silly because you haven't yet grasped what it is that makes him interesting. But you won't know it--until someone else has read it and told you.
Who? Your workshop? A teacher?
They really can't do the job you need. You need someone to read it now, today, the minute you finish it. Someone who is committed to your career and wants you to succeed almost as much as you do.
In other words, you need a spouse or very close friend who is a brilliant critic.
Right, you say. My husband reads my stories, but all he ever says is, "Pretty good." If you press him, he says, "I liked it." Some brilliant critic.
Here's the good news: You can turn almost any intelligent, committed person into the Wise Reader you need. But first you have to understand that a Wise Reader is not someone to tell you what to do next--it's someone to tell you what you have just done. In other words, you want your spouse or friend to report to you, in detail and accurately, on the experience of reading your story.
The audience never lies. When I was a playwright, I learned something about audiences. After the performance, everybody lies and tells you it was wonderful. But during the performance of a play, the audience will never lie. By the way they lean forward in their seats, eyes riveted on the stage, they well you that they're interested, tense, anxious--exactly what you want. Then, suddenly, a large number of them shift in their seats, glance down at their program--without meaning to, they're telling you that something's wrong with the play, you've lost their attention.
As a fiction writer, you can't watch what they do while they're reading your manuscript. But you can train one reader to notice his own process of reading and take notes that will help you find the weak spots in your manuscript. You want him to keep a record of symptoms--what the story does to him.
For this job, it's better if your Wise Reader is not trained in literature--he'll be less likely to give you diagnoses ("The characterization was thin") or, heaven help us, prescriptions ("You need to cut out all this description"). The Wise Reader doesn't imagine for a moment that he can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it.
Questions. How do you train him? You ask questions:
Were you ever bored? Did you find your mind wandering? Can you tell me where in the story this was happening? (Let him take his time, look back through the story, find a place where he remembers losing interest.)
What did you think about the character named Magwall? Did you like him? Hate him? Keep forgetting who he was? (If he hates your character for the right reasons, that's good news; if he couldn't remember who he was from one chapter to the next, that's very bad news.)
Was there anything you didn't understand? Is there any section you had to read twice? Is there any place where you got confused? (The answers to such questions will tell you where exposition isn't handled well, or where action is confusing.)
Was there anything you didn't believe? Any time when you said, "Oh, come on!" (This will help you catch cliches or places where you need to go into more detail in your world creation.)
What do you think will happen next? What are you still wondering about? (If what he read is a fragment, the answers to such questions will tell you what lines of tension you have succeeded in establishing; if what he read is the whole story, the answers to these questions will tell you what lines of tension you haven't resolved.)
You won't be asking such questions for long. Pretty soon your Wise Reader will learn to notice his own internal processes as he reads. He'll note points of confusion, unbelievability, cliche, boredom; he'll think about how he feels about characters and tell you afterward.
Through exactly this process of asking questions, I turned my wife, Kristine, into my Wise Reader very early in our marriage. Because of her responses and concerns, my work is many times better than it would otherwise have been. Also, she's part of every page of every story I write--instead of my writing being a point of conflict in our marriage, as it is for many other writers, it's one of the places where we're most closely involved with each other.
Of course, I had to treat her observations with respect. Even when her responses hurt my feelings, I had to thank her. Most important, I had to do something to address the issues she raised; she had to see that her observations were leading to adjustments in the manuscript. She has never prescribed--never told me what I ought to do.
But the quid pro quo is that I have never left any of the symptoms untreated. I always do something to address every problem she reports in her reading process. At first this was sometimes hard, because I would think she was "wrong." I quickly learned, however, that she can't possibly be wrong--the Wise Reader never is. Why? Because the Wise Reader is reporting on his or her own experience of reading. How can she be wrong about her own experience?
Maybe sometimes Kristine's reaction to something in my story has been a private reaction--no one else would be bothered by the problem she uncovered. But I've always found--always--that once I started changing the problem aspect of the story, I improved it.
And now Kristine is so skilled at reading a story and so familiar with the things I do to fix certain problems, that she knows before I do exactly what changes I'll make. This can be disconcerting, like when a friend or spouse starts finishing your sentences for you, but it's also comforting to know how well she knows me.
She paid a terrible price for becoming my Wise Reader, however. Now she reads everything the way she reads my fiction, noticing when she's bored, when she doesn't believe, when she's confused, when she doesn't care about a character, when a plot question is unresolved. It spoils an awful lot of books and stories for her. But we think it's worth it. And when I turn in a fiction manuscript, we're both sure that it's ready to publish as it is.
-- pp 121-124 of Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. Published by Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio in 1990.
Creating a Wise Reader
Rare is the writer who actually knows what he's written when it first comes out on paper. A passage you think is clear won't be. A character you think is fascinating will bore other people silly because you haven't yet grasped what it is that makes him interesting. But you won't know it--until someone else has read it and told you.
Who? Your workshop? A teacher?
They really can't do the job you need. You need someone to read it now, today, the minute you finish it. Someone who is committed to your career and wants you to succeed almost as much as you do.
In other words, you need a spouse or very close friend who is a brilliant critic.
Right, you say. My husband reads my stories, but all he ever says is, "Pretty good." If you press him, he says, "I liked it." Some brilliant critic.
Here's the good news: You can turn almost any intelligent, committed person into the Wise Reader you need. But first you have to understand that a Wise Reader is not someone to tell you what to do next--it's someone to tell you what you have just done. In other words, you want your spouse or friend to report to you, in detail and accurately, on the experience of reading your story.
The audience never lies. When I was a playwright, I learned something about audiences. After the performance, everybody lies and tells you it was wonderful. But during the performance of a play, the audience will never lie. By the way they lean forward in their seats, eyes riveted on the stage, they well you that they're interested, tense, anxious--exactly what you want. Then, suddenly, a large number of them shift in their seats, glance down at their program--without meaning to, they're telling you that something's wrong with the play, you've lost their attention.
As a fiction writer, you can't watch what they do while they're reading your manuscript. But you can train one reader to notice his own process of reading and take notes that will help you find the weak spots in your manuscript. You want him to keep a record of symptoms--what the story does to him.
For this job, it's better if your Wise Reader is not trained in literature--he'll be less likely to give you diagnoses ("The characterization was thin") or, heaven help us, prescriptions ("You need to cut out all this description"). The Wise Reader doesn't imagine for a moment that he can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it.
Questions. How do you train him? You ask questions:
Were you ever bored? Did you find your mind wandering? Can you tell me where in the story this was happening? (Let him take his time, look back through the story, find a place where he remembers losing interest.)
What did you think about the character named Magwall? Did you like him? Hate him? Keep forgetting who he was? (If he hates your character for the right reasons, that's good news; if he couldn't remember who he was from one chapter to the next, that's very bad news.)
Was there anything you didn't understand? Is there any section you had to read twice? Is there any place where you got confused? (The answers to such questions will tell you where exposition isn't handled well, or where action is confusing.)
Was there anything you didn't believe? Any time when you said, "Oh, come on!" (This will help you catch cliches or places where you need to go into more detail in your world creation.)
What do you think will happen next? What are you still wondering about? (If what he read is a fragment, the answers to such questions will tell you what lines of tension you have succeeded in establishing; if what he read is the whole story, the answers to these questions will tell you what lines of tension you haven't resolved.)
You won't be asking such questions for long. Pretty soon your Wise Reader will learn to notice his own internal processes as he reads. He'll note points of confusion, unbelievability, cliche, boredom; he'll think about how he feels about characters and tell you afterward.
Through exactly this process of asking questions, I turned my wife, Kristine, into my Wise Reader very early in our marriage. Because of her responses and concerns, my work is many times better than it would otherwise have been. Also, she's part of every page of every story I write--instead of my writing being a point of conflict in our marriage, as it is for many other writers, it's one of the places where we're most closely involved with each other.
Of course, I had to treat her observations with respect. Even when her responses hurt my feelings, I had to thank her. Most important, I had to do something to address the issues she raised; she had to see that her observations were leading to adjustments in the manuscript. She has never prescribed--never told me what I ought to do.
But the quid pro quo is that I have never left any of the symptoms untreated. I always do something to address every problem she reports in her reading process. At first this was sometimes hard, because I would think she was "wrong." I quickly learned, however, that she can't possibly be wrong--the Wise Reader never is. Why? Because the Wise Reader is reporting on his or her own experience of reading. How can she be wrong about her own experience?
Maybe sometimes Kristine's reaction to something in my story has been a private reaction--no one else would be bothered by the problem she uncovered. But I've always found--always--that once I started changing the problem aspect of the story, I improved it.
And now Kristine is so skilled at reading a story and so familiar with the things I do to fix certain problems, that she knows before I do exactly what changes I'll make. This can be disconcerting, like when a friend or spouse starts finishing your sentences for you, but it's also comforting to know how well she knows me.
She paid a terrible price for becoming my Wise Reader, however. Now she reads everything the way she reads my fiction, noticing when she's bored, when she doesn't believe, when she's confused, when she doesn't care about a character, when a plot question is unresolved. It spoils an awful lot of books and stories for her. But we think it's worth it. And when I turn in a fiction manuscript, we're both sure that it's ready to publish as it is.
-- pp 121-124 of Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy. Published by Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, Ohio in 1990.
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