Getting to Know Your Readers Week Day Four: How to Be Invisible

All the tools and mechanics we learn in this workshop have one goal in common: To help the reader become so immersed in your work that you, the writer, become invisible to them. They’ve entered an entirely new world and forgotten they’re reading at all. When I was in my early 20s I began reading a novel in the late morning. I became so immersed in the book that I didn’t even notice dinnertime had passed.

How do we immerse our readers that thoroughly? That’s the question we’ll all be asking for the rest of our lives, but one of the hardest lessons to learn is that you, the writer, should not exist in your own fiction. Your reader should be so convinced of your story’s authenticity that they forget they’re even reading words, let alone those set down by a writer.

For that reason, the writer has no rights in their own story.

The writer should not opine about the story.

The writer should not address the reader directly.

The writer shouldn’t even be the same person as the narrator.

In order for a narrator to be convincing, he should be as unreliable, flawed, and unique as any other human.

A real narrator has his own life and opinions. A real narrator doesn’t have god-like omniscience like the writer. He can’t read the minds of a book’s characters or give us all the information the writer knows. A real narrator can only be in one place at any given time, and none of those places is inside the brains of the book’s characters.

Writers can’t be unreliable in their own stories. They are the gods of their books and know far too much about their characters to make for credible narrators.

Writers have ulterior motives. They want to push the story along, entertain people, and perhaps make a philosophical point.

A real narrator has no such interests.

Your readers will only become immersed in your stories if they’re authentic, so learning to write means learning how to leave no trace of yourself in your fiction writing. Your readers will connect far more readily to a flawed and unreliable narrator than they will an omnipresent writer.

You might write your stories, but that doesn’t mean your readers want to connect with you when they read them. Most of the time, readers want to be left alone to draw their own conclusions and do their own moralising.

You, writer, should not exist.