The chart to the left, shared by my friend Jill Widner, reveals some sobering facts about reading and books. My novel faces an uphill slog towards publication for a good reason. But still: 43% of books are read till the end, savored I hope, and loved. And if 70% of adults haven't been in a bookstore, perhaps at least a certain percentage of those bookstore-deprived people have ordered books online, or directly from an author's site, as I've done on occasion. Why pay the middlepeeps when you don't have to?
As a child, I read voraciously. While my sisters and their friends usually used their 20-pence pieces to buy Cadbury's chocolate or other sweets at H. Williams* in Dundrum after Mum picked us up from school on Wednesday afternoons, I always bought cheap volumes of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven and Fabulous Five series. I read them by flashlight under my duvet at night, but loved more furiously Watership Down and The Yearling, which brought me to sobs in the silence of my room. And now I want to do what writers did for me so many years ago; they replaced the cold blue of my room with sailboats and islands and horses galloping down shale slopes and rabbits in deep underground warrens and dying fawns. (I read The Yearling only once, and can't imagine reading it again. It turned me against guns and hunting and any desire to eat meat; I cried for days, and while that might sound devastating and terrible, I think it's not: "The more a child reads, the likelier they are able to understand the emotions of others," the chart above says. Yes. That.)
Pam, a long-time, now-retired colleague, asked me a couple of provoking questions: "But the question in your blog is how does a writer engage readers. So, who will the readers be? How do you expect or anticipate them to show engagement? Are they going to be readers or reader/writers?"
I had to think about the answer for a while. I wasn't thinking of an audience for my novel Entangled Time as I wrote it. My sister Moira had read the draft and said it reminded her of a cross between Maya Angelou and the novel The Help. I think that works. It's literary, I hope, somewhat historical fiction, and perhaps is written in an accessible enough way to be appealing to an audience with an interest in topics such as racism, dying, love, the nature of God, physics, intergenerational secrets and family dysfunction.
But that brings me to the question of the audience for my blog. I began it to track how I'm doing connecting with my formerly abused horse Lexi without a sense that I was writing "to people." That was the plan, anyway. Then I got self-conscious and started writing for an imagined audience, so my writing took on a more structured, formalized feel. And now I'm throwing in writing as a topic and I'm wondering how few of my potential readers might love both horses AND writing. Should I split the blog up? Two blogs: Horse training (via the clicker), and a sabbatical-theme blog about writing and engaging readers?
Oh, screw it. That's getting entirely too complicated. People are multi-faceted. If you're like my dad and you think horses are worthless creatures that "bite at one end, kick at the other and consume a hell of a lot of money in the middle," then ignore the horse posts. And if you just want Lexi stories and not all these words about writing and readers and theories about humanity, ignore the writing posts. Yes?
It's a work in progress, that's for sure. Now to figure out how to get the visuals that will hold the attention of increasingly visual readers!
*H. Williams image scanned by Brand New Retro and found here.
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