The Problem with "Trust Your Reader"

There’s a common adage in writing you probably have heard: trust your reader. We are to assume our reader can and will find the pieces we’ve created and puzzle out our meanings.

This isn’t just a refrain you see in craft books and reddit threads, either. It was often used in my MFA classes, too. Sometimes, it was a veiled critique, like, “I really like how you trust your reader here, but this needs a bit more explanation…” Other times, it came out as an exhortation: “I think you can cut some of this exposition and trust your reader to figure it out.”

I dutifully noted the advice when it came my way and occasionally offered it myself or used it in a lit class, where we’d praise an author for trusting their brilliant readers (in this case, us). It wasn’t until I’d been out of my MFA program a year that I realized how backward the advice is.

I was knee-deep in editing my first draft of my book. I knew enough to know it needed work. Among many other questions, I wondered about trusting my reader. Was I doing it? Should I be? Did I even know what that would look like?

Concurrently, I found myself chewing on an unrelated comment from one of my professors (the illustrious Courtney Brkic). She’d given the feedback based on a very early draft of a chapter in my thesis that no longer existed. Watch out, she noted, for repetition. Not of words, or even phrases or facts—but places where I was tempted to restate something I’d already said. The danger was that by offering two versions of a thing, one of them invariably works better, seems stronger, is more effective—and that makes the other one less good, weaker.

This is good advice, and I’ll eventually get around to unpacking what it means, because there's a very valuable, practical craft lesson in there (particularly if you write, like I do, largely by rhythm).

In my gut, I felt these two ideas were somehow connected, though I couldn't tell you why, and so they both churned in my mind as I worked, pressing onward, assuming I’d build my wings on the way down. This strategy, by the way—learning while doing—seems to be the only way I’ve ever learned anything about writing. Clarity comes through work, the way neurons link ideas to action often feeling like serendipity instead of science.

Over months of rewriting, I came to see this tendency Courtney noted for myself. I saw descriptions of something being “X and Y” where those two things were really both attempts at saying “Z,” which I also often wrote. I noticed places where in the space of a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph, or a chapter, I’d try twice at weaving the same emotion through a character’s dialogue or the same mood through a description. Or I’d find myself hitting an idea too on-the-nose the first time, then with greater nuance the second. I even found whole scenes that seemed to be striking the same chord without adding anything new.

It's possible I started applying the advice more broadly than I was meant to. But as I forced myself to make choices, the book got stronger. And, interestingly, I found myself saying, without even thinking, “That’s clear enough. The reader will get it.”

Trust the reader, I said to myself, in moments of doubt—trust the reader. They’ll be able to do this, even if you don't think so.

And that’s when the lightbulb went off.

It’s not the reader I need to learn to trust at all. It’s myself.

I need to learn that my subtlety is enough. I need to learn that my way of telling the story is effective. I need to trust that I’m a good enough writer to say all the things I want to say in the way I want to say them, and that my ideas will be carried by my words in a way that can reach and become real to a reader I may never know. I need to trust that my first way of saying something works so I won’t feel the need to say it again. I need to believe in my ability to be delicate and deft and also, miraculously, understood.

I need to trust myself.

This is a profoundly different statement, in the end, than being told to trust your reader, and yet it often leads to the same end result. The writing improves, the reader is given the chance to work at interpretation in the way they really, desperately want to (more on this later), and both the storytelling and the relationships we create on and across the page grow richer. What this version of trust accomplishes along the way, though, is really quite different than belief in your unknown readers. Trusting ourselves goes far beyond the work or project in question and becomes a craft lesson for the whole of our creative lives. It’s a lesson that has the power to reshape our approach to our writing in a much more intrinsic way, recasting our relationship with our readers as a partnership of good faith in both directions.

Next time you think of how a book or an author trusted you, think of how that little bit of faith wasn’t an isolated incident, but rather an extension of the author’s practice of faith in themselves. And more importantly, the next time you are making a choice in your work, choose trusting yourself. Do the weirder thing, the one you’re not sure will work, the more subtle one, the one that requires a leap of faith from the person on the other side of the page. Your readers will thank you for it, certainly, but so will the you who is writing tomorrow, or ten years from now, or twenty.

Little by little, you can cultivate deeper confidence in your own words--maybe even in yourself.

And if you don’t feel that confidence right away (because, if you’re like me, you won’t)?

Here’s another free craft lesson for you:

Fake it ‘til you make it. Act like you’re trusting yourself, even if you have to bring the senss of self-doubt with you for the ride, and you may find the feelings just follow along someday.