Author: Susanna J. Sturgis

J Is for Journey

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 11 Comments

“A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.”

That’s Ursula K. Le Guin in “Talking About Writing” which you can find in her Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (1979). I don’t write fantasy, but I’ve read a lot of it, which may explain why fantasy elements keep sneaking into my real-time fiction.

It may also explain why for me writing is a journey, especially writing fiction, and everything Le Guin says about fantasy applies. The journey I’ve been on for three years now started with a dog running through the woods and a girl sitting on a playground swing. As I wrote my way toward them, I began to understand who they were and how they were connected.

I also ventured deep and deeper into my own subconscious, or memory, or imagination, whatever it is, and found images and questions that preoccupied me in the past but that I’d set aside. Rescue — both rescuing and being rescued — was a big one. In my novel in progress, the rescue of the dog turned out to be pretty easy. The rescue of the girl is still working itself out. I’m still not 100% sure of what she needs to be rescued from, but it’s a lot clearer — and more unsettling — than it was when I started. So are the stories and motivations of the would-be rescuers.

One of my mantras is “Your writing will teach you what you need to know.” It will, but the catch is that you have to keep doing it. My hunch is that a fair amount of what’s called “writer’s block” stems from the cautious mind’s fear of those subconscious places where reason has to relinquish control. The fear is totally justified because, as Le Guin wrote, the journey will change you.

It may change you in ways you don’t expect and can’t control, that may sharpen or blur your vision enough to unsettle your view of the world. It’s a wild magic, writing.

As the letter J drew closer in my passage through the alphabet, I couldn’t decide between “journey” and “journal.” The two words had to be closely related, I thought, and so they are: both stem from the Latin word for “day,” diurnis, by way of the Anglo-French. If you know any French, or even if you don’t, the “jour-” in “journey” and “journal” probably suggests jour, the French word for “day.”

“Journey,” it seems, originally suggested a day’s travel. Now a journey can take much longer, especially if you’re working on a book-length work, but breaking it down into days isn’t a bad idea. The journey may indeed lead into dangerous places, but the closer you get, the less scary they seem — because you’re getting braver with every step you take, every word you write.

The journey continues.

 

I Is for Italics

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After reading “E Is for Ellipsis,” my friend the mystery writer Cynthia Riggs emailed me. “I can hardly wait until u get to I,” she wrote. “I, I hope, will stand for ‘italics.'”

This sentence is set in italics. In typographical terms, type that isn’t italicized is called “roman.” Most of this blog post – and most of most books — is set in roman type. For most fonts, roman is the default setting. Italics and bold are among its variations.

Cynthia is currently one of the jurors in a major mystery award’s first-novel category. The novels she has read so far are, to put it tactfully, a mixed bag. She went on:

The current book I am reviewing has alternate chapters printed in italics. ALL italics, page after page. It’s like reading someone’s handwritten manuscript. The chapters jump from one where I’m not even aware of the printed word, where the author’s voice goes directly into my brain, to a sudden slow-down where I must decipher each wiggly word and consider what the words mean when put together.

In another first-novel entrant, “each character’s words [were set] in a distinctive typeface so we, the readers, would know who’s speaking.”

Curious, I inspected these titles at the next opportunity, which arose PDQ because my Sunday-night writers’ group meets at Cynthia’s house. As I suspected, they were self-published. Self-publishing authors not only produce the manuscript; they also assemble the production team that sees it into print and markets it. Novice self-publishers often skimp on the professional editing and design that make a book readable.

A capable, experienced book designer knows  that in general the goal is to produce pages where, as Cynthia put it, readers are “not even aware of the printed word, where the author’s voice goes directly into [the reader’s] brain.” When the type calls attention to itself, it’s because the designer intended it to. In typography, less is often more. Any technique used to excess becomes, well, excessive. It loses impact and annoys the reader.

The digital age makes excess all too easy. Even the fairly basic options that WordPress offers bloggers include bold, italics, bold italics, strikeout, and lots of pretty colors. Word-processing apps like Word and LibreOffice offer a gazillion fonts in an array of sizes, most of which you would not want to read a whole book in, or even a short chapter.

Newspapers and other publications following the Associated Press (AP) stylebook have managed to get by without italics since forever. Before the age of digital composition, italics were hard to produce and couldn’t be transmitted by wire, which is how news stories were transmitted from the wire services to their subscribers around the world. However, as noted on the AP Stylebook‘s website, “Publications that adhere to AP editing style make their own decisions on graphics and design, including use of italics.”

That said, thanks to various widely accepted conventions,  italics do come in handy for conveying meaning, and good writers, editors, and designers learn to use them — and other typographical devices — wisely. Here are a few instances where the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS or CMoS) recommends the use of italics:

  • Titles of books and other full-length creative works. Short works, such as songs, poems, and short stories,  and the component parts of longer ones are set in roman with quotation marks. Example: “Natural Resources” is included in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974–1977, by Adrienne Rich.
  • Names of newspapers, e.g., the Martha’s Vineyard Times and the Vineyard Gazette. CMS  recommends setting “the” lowercase roman even when it’s part of the official title. Publications following AP style often initial-cap and italicize the whole official title, “the” included.
  • Foreign-language words that aren’t included in English-language dictionaries. For example, “raison d’être” comes from the French but is well established in English usage, so no italics. The Gaelic word uisge appears in one of my current copyediting projects. It’s not widely used in English, though the familiar word “whiskey” (also spelled “whisky”) is derived from it, so it’s italicized.

Many fiction writers use italics to indicate what a character is thinking, to distinguish it from what the character says out loud, which is set in roman with quotation marks on either side. Other writers stick with roman type but without the quotes. Either method can work, but keep in mind my friend Cynthia’s words. The goal is for the author’s voice to go directly into the reader’s brain. Typographical style can aid this process without calling attention to itself.

When writers rely too heavily on typography to get the point across, it’s often because the writing itself needs attention. Changes in speaker can be conveyed in words alone. Italics can be used to let readers know when a character is thinking to herself, but when the italics run on for a long paragraph or even a whole page or two, it’s time to take another look at the writing.

H Is for Handwriting

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 6 Comments

My handwriting sucks. Here’s a sample:

This is why I do nearly all my first-drafting in longhand: because I can’t read my own writing unless I slow way down and focus on each word.

It took me a while to figure out why I’d sometimes get so blocked — paralyzed! — when I did nearly all my writing on the computer. Maybe it’s because I’m an editor as well as a writer, or maybe it’s because I’m a recovering perfectionist who has occasional slips, but sometimes I’d stare at those crystal-clear words on the screen and think, No, that’s not right, and then get stuck trying to fix it instead of moving on.

Eventually I figured out that the best way to break through these blocks was to grab a pad of paper and a pen and get away from the computer. At the top of the paper I’d writing something like “I can’t write this scene because . . .”

And out would flow whatever I needed to know, and eventually the scene itself.

This was also a handy way of getting to know characters better. Whatever I wrote in longhand on a yellow pad wasn’t part of The Manuscript. I loosened up. No pressure. I could write anything I wanted.

My messy handwriting was an asset. What the internal editor couldn’t read, she couldn’t edit. Without the internal editor looking over my shoulder, I could write write write, not expecting anything to be perfect, knowing that there would be a second or third or fourth draft to get it just right.

So why wait till I got stuck to bring out the pen and paper? Why not start out that way?

I tried it. It worked. It’s still working. I do most of my first-drafting in longhand.

Pretty soon, however, the scrawl of a ballpoint pen across lined yellow paper was looking rather dull. I started acquiring fountain pens and bottles of different colored ink. I’ve currently got about a dozen of each. It’s a little ridiculous, but I couldn’t live without them.

The bonus is that ink blottings on paper towels are really pretty. I use them as coasters for my tea mugs and my beer steins. They make me happy.

ink blot

 

G Is for Grammar

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 5 Comments

We’re so quick to say that someone “doesn’t know their grammar” that it might be surprising how many of us aren’t entirely sure just what “grammar” is. This would include me. I just had to look it up (again). Here is what Bryan A. Garner, author of the “Grammar and Usage” chapter of the Chicago Manual of Style, has to say:

Grammar defined. Grammar consists of the rules governing how words are put together into sentences. These rules, which native speakers of a language learn largely by osmosis, govern most constructions in a given language. The small minority of constructions that lie outside these rules fall mostly into the category of idiom and usage.

In the very next paragraph he notes that “there are many schools of grammatical thought,” that “grammatical theories have been in great flux in recent years,” and that “the more we learn the less we seem to know.”

button: grammar police enforce the syntaxNot to worry about all this flux and multiplicity, at least not too much. A couple of things to keep in mind, however, when someone accuses you or not knowing your grammar or when, gods forbid, you are tempted to accuse someone else: (1) spelling and punctuation are not grammar, and (2) some of the rules you know are bogus.

If you’re not sure which of the rules you know are bogus — well, I just Googled bogus grammar rules (without quote marks) and got 338,000 hits. Bogus rules are the ones we generally don’t learn by osmosis. They are stuffed down our throats by those in authority, often teachers or parents.

At the top of almost everybody’s list are the injunctions against splitting an infinitive and ending a sentence with a preposition. They’ve both been roundly debunked, but I still get asked about one or the other from time to time so I’m pretty sure they’re not dead yet. Plenty of writers and even editors still get anxious when a “to” is split from its verb or a preposition bumps up against a period/full stop.

The general purpose of bogus rules is not to help one write more clearly; it’s to separate those who know them from those who don’t. As literacy spread and anyone could learn to read and write, the excruciatingly well educated upper classes confronted a dilemma: how in heaven’s name can we tell US from THEM? Hence the rules — about language, etiquette, and various other things.

Note, however, that the uppermost class can generally get away with anything, so the ones who follow and strive to enforce the bogus rules are often those a notch or two below in the pecking order. That’s how they demonstrate their loyalty to those at the top. Watch out for them.

F Is for Fact-Checking

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 2 Comments

Fact-checking is much in the news these days — or perhaps it’s the absence of it that’s much in the news.

It used to be, and may still be, that top-quality magazines had fact-checkers whose job was to go through every story accepted for publication and check all the facts. They weren’t responsible for the quality of the prose — just the facts.

Editing — specifically copyediting, which includes excruciating attention to detail — and fact-checking are two distinct tasks, but inevitably they overlap. Imprecise writing can lead to readerly misunderstanding, and those misunderstandings may have to do with facts. A trade publisher I’ve been working for regularly for many years directs copyeditors to check dates, the spelling of names, and anything that can be easily verified as long as it doesn’t add to billable time.

Before the World Wide Web, freelance copyeditors were limited to biographical dictionaries, atlases, specialized reference books, and such. Because these had been subjected to a rigorous editing process, they were reliable, but they were also limited in scope. Print references start going out of date even before they’re published, and the further your interests strayed from white male English-speakers, the harder it was to find any facts, verified or not.

In the Age of Google, you can find almost anything on the Web, but plenty of it hasn’t been subjected to either fact-checking or editing. As you’ve probably learned for yourself, verifying the attribution of a quotation is a particular challenge because misattributions seem to multiply exponentially — giving rise to memes like the classic at left (variations of which have also been attributed to Mark Twain, among others).

Copyeditors generally do our fact-checking on the fly and with the help of a search engine. We develop a sixth sense for determining the reliability of sites we’ve never visited before. (Hint: This often involves the quality of both writing and design. If the copy is riddled with typos and strange punctuation, I’ll move on PDQ. Ditto with any site that uses white type against a dark background.)

We also develop a sixth sense for what facts in a manuscript need to be checked. When starting a new job, I’ll fact-check a few names and dates to get a feel for how careful the author is. If the author seems reliable (as is usually the case in the stuff I work on), I’ll look up anything that smells funny and spot-check facts here and there just for the hell of it.

Ultimately writers are responsible for the accuracy of their facts, but a book-length work of nonfiction involves a myriad of facts, and it’s all too easy to transpose letters in a name or figures in a number and wind up with a goof.

Writers whose work is based on research do plenty of fact-checking while they’re writing. Written sources may contain errors, or contradict each other, or be superseded by later works.

I think the journalists have it hardest. Many of their sources are living people talking about events that have just happened. These informants bring different perspectives to the event, they see it from different angles, some are more observant than others — and some may be deliberately shading or hiding what they know, for reasons they’re unlikely to be upfront about and may even be unaware of. And the journalists are generally working on deadlines that don’t leave time for leisurely fact-checking.

Button: I never believe anything until it's been officially denied.In this age of spin and “fake news” each of us has to do our own fact-checking. Because we rarely have the time or inclination to check every fact, we generally focus on the source, the news outlet: if it’s got a good track record, it’s probably because its reporters, editors, and fact-checkers are on the ball. When they screw up, our faith is shaken. Was this an aberration, or are they going down the tubes?

At least in our wiser moments, good editors and writers know that 100% accuracy is impossible, but that doesn’t stop us from expecting it of ourselves and of those we respect, and from turning on anyone who doesn’t live up to our expectations.

In my weekly newspaper days I quickly learned that if we spelled the name of someone’s child or grandchild wrong, that person would remember it forever. Worse, it could easily become a cornerstone in that person’s conviction that the paper was careless with facts. It’s not hard to understand: misspellings and factual errors are easier to recognize than sloppy sourcing or sloppy writing, and they stick in the mind longer. It’s not fair, but there’s an upside to it: if you’re scrupulously accurate with your easy-to-check facts, your work will be more credible.

And when the liars, spammers, and misrepresenters catch on, we’re all in big trouble.

E Is for Ellipsis

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 5 Comments

An ellipsis is three dots.

An ellipsis comprises three dots. (See, I have to show that I know how to use “comprise” in what used to be considered the correct manner.)

An ellipsis consists of three dots with spaces between them.

. . .

not

…

I don’t get feisty about the things some editors get feisty about. I mean, I’m behind the serial comma, but I don’t believe those who don’t use it are trying to destroy the English language, western civilization, or some other cosmic entity. Ellipses, on the other hand . . .

Aside: That wasn’t an ellipsis. Those were suspension points. Read on for clarification.

I get feisty about ellipses. In my mind, for instance, there is no such thing as a “four-dot ellipsis.” An ellipsis comprises three dots. The fourth dot is a period — “full stop” if you’re working in British English (BrE).

Let me back up a bit. When you’re quoting from someone else’s work and you decide to skip some of the original writer’s words, you use an ellipsis to indicate the omission. Say I wanted to quote from the previous paragraph, but I wanted to drop “for instance.” I might write this: “In my mind . . . there is no such thing as a ‘four-dot ellipsis.'”

When would you use a four-dot ellipsisperiod followed by an ellipsis? When what you decide to drop follows a complete sentence. The complete sentence ends with a period, you add the ellipsis, then you carry on with your quotation.

Here I part company with the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), so if you’re a dedicated follower of Chicago you better clap your hands over your ears. I want my readers to figure out as much as possible about the source of my abridged quote, so I don’t insert a period where there wasn’t one in the original, even if the remnant is a complete sentence. A capital letter signifies where the next complete sentence begins, and that’s enough.

So — suspension points. What are they? Suspension points indicate a trailing off, a suspension. Whatever was going to be said is suspended — it hangs in the air. I like the common convention in American English (AmE) that three dots indicate a trailing off, but a dash indicates an interruption. A while back I wrote about this in “Of Dots and Dashes.” Do note that at that time I either didn’t know or didn’t care about the distinction between ellipses and suspension points. 🙂

D Is for Deadline

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I was thinking “D is for Dictionary,” but I’m in deadline hell at the moment so Deadline won.

Most editors and writers have mixed feelings about deadlines. We love them when we’ve met them, not least because if this is a paid gig  the check will shortly be in the mail or payment will land in our bank account.

Until then, however, deadlines are swords of Damocles hanging over our heads and dominating our thoughts even when we’re not supposed to be thinking about work.

I’m never more focused than when I’m on deadline. Deadlines make it easier to set priorities: “No, I can’t drop everything and go to lunch. This has to be done by tomorrow.”

Deadlines also make it easier to get out of stuff you don’t want to do anyway. It’s so much easier to say “Sorry, I can’t — deadlines!” than “No, I really don’t want to sit through another three-hour meeting where nothing gets done.” (I hope I didn’t blow my, or your, cover with that one.)

My years working for a weekly newspaper taught me a lot about deadlines. Web-based publications may have rolling deadlines, but print is less flexible. During much of my time at the paper it was not flexible at all: “the boards” from which the paper was printed had to be on a certain boat or a certain plane to make their rendezvous with the printer’s representative on the other side of Vineyard Sound. (Living on an island does complicate things somewhat.) The adrenaline surge on Wednesday afternoon was exhilarating, especially if a story broke late: the reporter might be typing furiously at 3 p.m. while Production rearranged pages to make room for new copy.

Don’t be like this. Please.

As an editor, I learned just how annoying it can be when writers blow off deadlines without advance warning, or turn in copy that’s longer, shorter, or sloppier than expected.

Being a fairly slow writer, I learned to appreciate my colleague whose copy might be sloppy but who could crank out anything if it was needed to fill a gap, maybe because an ad was cancelled or a story pulled or another writer didn’t make his or her deadline.  I could clean up sloppy copy much faster than I could turn out something that didn’t need editing.

Sometimes an impending newspaper deadline made me buckle down and write something that I would cheerfully have given up on under any other circumstances. Once I had to review a local production of Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days.  The acting was fine, but I had no idea what the play was about — and this was before the digital age, when an hour or so online would have given me enough background to BS semi-intelligently about Beckett.

So in desperation I transcribed and embellished the notes I’d taken during the play, which were sort of a stream-of-consciousness attempt to make sense of what I was seeing. Then I knocked them into paragraphs and called it a review. After the review appeared in print, the actress who’d played Winnie told me that she thought I really “got” what the play was about. Go figure. Maybe the desperation born of deadlines can make you smarter than you think you are.

For me the biggest challenge is having no deadline at all. Projects without deadlines tend to get pushed down the priority list again and again. How to keep going when your own enthusiasm flags or you hit a roadblock that you can’t see around?

No one’s waiting for my novel in progress, but two mini-deadlines keep me going. One is to write “every damn day.” (That blog post is about what happened when I let work deadlines take too much precedence over my own writing. It wasn’t pretty, but I know what to do when I get into that kind of trouble.) The other is my writers’ group, the Sunday Writers, which meets (you guessed it) every Sunday evening. All of us bring pages to nearly every meeting, and many’s the time that deadline has made me keep writing or revising till I had something coherent enough to bring to group.

C Is for Comma

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 2 Comments

As noted in “A Is for Audience,” I started this A-to-Z challenge a little late. C should have been posted on the 4th, but it’s currently the 6th. I’m backdating this post to the 4th to make myself look good. I will catch up, I promise.

According to Sturgis’s Law #5, “Hyphens are responsible for at least 90 percent of all trips to the dictionary. Commas are responsible for at least 90 percent of all trips to the style guide.”

Is it a comma, or is it an apostrophe? Without more context, like maybe a baseline, it’s hard to tell.

Commas drive many writers and editors crazy, mostly because they are convinced that there are places where commas must always be used and places where commas must never be used, and the rules that specify which places are which are both inscrutable and shifty, which is to say they swap places in the night just to mess with people’s heads.

Commas are useful little buggers. Writing that consists of long comma-less sentences is devilish hard to read, and besides, we usually talk in phrases, emphasizing some words and not others. Commas, and punctuation generally, help shape your sentences so they’ll be read, understood, and heard the way you want them to be.

Yes, it’s usually a good idea to put a comma before the conjunction that separates two independent clauses:

She dashed down the stairs and into the street, but the car was already disappearing around the corner.

But when the clauses are short, a comma might feel like overkill:

Michaela went into the garden and Joan left the party.

But a comma wouldn’t be wrong in the sentence just above, nor would it be wrong to omit it in “She dashed down the stairs . . .” Much depends on how the writer hears the sentence, and how she wants readers to hear it. A comma does suggest, or at least permit, a pause.

Not all writers hear the words we write, but some of us definitely do. When I’m editing and come to a comma in an unconventional place, or an absence where convention thinks a comma should be, I read the sentence aloud with and without the comma. Do the two versions feel different? If so, which works better in context?

Commas are small but powerful. Don’t be afraid of them. Put them to work.

For more of my thoughts on commas, check out “Dot Comma.” And if you have any questions or advice about commas, let me know.

B Is for Backmatter

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Yeah, both Merriam-Webster’s and American Heritage make it two words, but it’s my blog and they’re not telling me what to do. Hmm. I have this hunch that D is gonna be for Dictionary . . .

As noted in “A Is for Audience,” I started this A-to-Z challenge a little late. B should have been posted on the 3rd, but it’s currently the 5th. I’m backdating this post to the 3rd to make myself look good.

So what’s backmatter (or back matter)? It’s what follows the main text in a published book. With fiction the backmatter is usually short. It might comprise acknowledgments (which sometimes appear in the frontmatter — guess what that is?), the author’s bio, and — a regular feature of one trade publisher for which I edit regularly — “A Note About the Type.” Meaning the history of the typeface the designer chose to set the book in. Print geeks like me love this stuff.

Nonfiction, especially academic nonfiction, is a whole other (excuse my English) matter. In histories, biographies, and any nonfiction that involves any kind of research, the backmatter can make up a quarter or more of the book’s total pages. In a nonfiction work, the backmatter often includes endnotes, bibliographies or reference lists, and indexes. It may include a glossary or an appendix or two.

Citations — meaning especially endnotes, footnotes, and bibliographies — drive grad students, professors, journalists, and others crazy. They especially drive editors crazy, especially when authors have been inconsistent in the formatting or inaccurate in the details. Almost every assertion in an academic work has to be sourced: the author has to tell the reader where it came from, so the reader can, if so inclined, check it out. This sourcing is done in endnotes and footnotes (which aren’t considered backmatter because they aren’t in the back), and then all the works cited in the notes are compiled in a bibliography or reference list.

There are, in other words, good reasons for confusing “backmatter” with “dark matter.”

When I start a copyediting job, it doesn’t take me long to figure out whether the author is careful or careless.  Sometimes I can tell at a glance whether a cited work’s publication info is correct. Other times I have to look it up. If the author is careful, I spot-check the occasional reference and don’t worry too much. If not — I look up a lot, gnashing my teeth all the while.

Asked to provide an estimate for a nonfiction job, some editors will provide an estimate for the main text but then say they’ll charge by the hour for the backmatter. I totally get it. Backmatter words and main-text words are not created equal. Charging by the hour motivates some authors to do more of the heavy lifting themselves instead of expecting the editor to do it.

It’s when I’m editing backmatter that I most appreciate the Chicago Manual of Style or whatever other style guide I’m supposed to be following. Who wants to invent citation style from scratch? Not me. Here is one area where I’m grateful to have “rules” to follow, and I’m happy to follow those rules.

A Is for Audience

/ Susanna J. Sturgis / 4 Comments

Eek! I was reminded on Sunday, April 2, that I fully intended to take part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. The challenge was supposed to begin on April 1. The idea is to blog every day except Sunday, with each post taking as its theme a letter of the alphabet, starting with A. Taking Sundays off leaves 26 days in April, there are 26 letters in the alphabet — brilliant idea.

However . . .

Travvy waits

Trav spends a lot of time waiting for me to get home or get up from the computer.

My Sunday looked like one one I blogged about in “Calendars Rule“: I left the apartment at quarter to one and didn’t return home to stay till quarter past nine, having spent the time between at a political meeting, a rehearsal, a mailing party for a local political candidate, and my weekly writers’ group meeting. I did manage to return home long enough to take a walk with Travvy, give him his supper, and print out the pages I was taking to writers’ group.

Since then I’ve been in book review hell, which transforms all other writing into a guilty pleasure I should not indulge until the review is done.

However #2 . . .

I really want to do this A to Z thing. I want to blog shorter and more regularly, and deadlines really do help. (See, there’s an idea for D!) So I’m starting late. This post is backdated to April 1, although it’s being written on the 5th. I’ll catch up, I promise.

So — A is for Audience.

Actors in a theater and singers and musicians in a concert hall or coffeehouse can see, hear, and feel their audience. Even when they’re separated by rows of seats and what actors call the “fourth wall,” audience and performers are interacting. Not only are audiences moved by what’s happening onstage, the performers can be powerfully affected by the presence of audience.

town meeting audience

The audience at an annual town meeting in my town. We’re a very engaged bunch.

For most writers most of the time, the audience is not physically present while we’re writing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Even when we’re writing primarily for ourselves, we’re consciously or unconsciously choosing our words with someone or someones in mind. These imaginary readers (who may include people we know in real life) help us focus our work.

Here’s an example: My fiction is set on Martha’s Vineyard, where I live, but I’m writing for an audience that includes readers who don’t live here, have never been here, and maybe have never heard of the place. So I need to bring the place alive for those people without boring local readers with too much information or pissing them off with generalizations that don’t hold up to close scrutiny.

As an editor, I work on fiction, general nonfiction, and academic nonfiction. I like the variety, in part because it forces me to think about audience. I recently worked on a academic paper about the evolution of a particular concept in Egyptian literature. The target audience can be expected to have interest in and considerable knowledge about the Middle East in general but not necessarily about Egypt or Arabic literature or the period being examined.

Another recent project was a book about artificial intelligence. It was written for a general audience, which made me a good editor for it because I’m interested in the subject but don’t know much about it, and I’m pretty much lost when it comes to physics and computer science. The author did an excellent job of presenting complex ideas for a lay audience. When something was unclear to me, I asked myself whether this was due to the writing or to my lack of knowledge; in many instances, I’d do a Google search to find out how familiar the point might be to a general audience and how readily readers could fill in their own knowledge gaps.

The idea of audience can be paralyzing to writers who’ve rarely taken their work out in public. This is why I encourage writers who want to eventually see their work in print to start sharing it as soon as they, and it, are ready, and maybe a little sooner than that.

You’re probably already thinking about audience when you write. The audience in your mind is helping guide your decisions about what needs explaining and what can be left out. By testing your work on real people, you may discover that this or that point isn’t as clear as you thought it was, or that two equally astute readers may have different ideas about a character’s motivation. What you do with this information is, of course, up to you.

Coming soon: “B is for . . .”