Some Reasons to Not Trust The Reader

 1. They don’t get it
It’s like telling a joke that has all the elements of a good joke: great set up, excellent timing, just the right amount of detail at the right time, but most of the hearers have no idea what is funny about it. In all likelihood they will laugh anyway, like the people who get it, they will say that it is funny, and later on, when they talk about the joke they will say that yes, that guy, he is really funny, and that the joke was hilarious. They may even be sincere. Maybe you can tell that something is brilliant even if you don’t know why it’s brilliant. In the case of the writer, though, it kind of defeats the purpose. If you are a writer I dare you to write an article or a short story knowing full well that the readers simply will not understand.

2. If they do, it still does nothing
So lets say you write a profound piece on the Israeli Palestinian conflicts. You are insightful, maybe even the most insightful person ever to write an article on the situation. In 2,000 words you sum up perfectly what is wrong giving slants on it that your readers can see are novel and astonishingly profound. Nobody has ever written a piece as brilliant as yours. Will it change anything? No. Let’s say you write this for an audience that has hitherto ignored the situation. You manage through sheer eloquence and acrobatic rhetoric, to show Japanese Americans how the Middle East situation applies to them, how it affects them and their lives in a way that does no one else’s. Will it motivate them to action? Probably not. Almost certainly not. Words by themselves have a way of not accomplishing much.

3. Why they read
People read to feel knowledgeable. Not to be knowledgeable in any practical sense, not to be able to effect any kind of real world motion, but to feel a certain way. Reading is about getting a feeling. Thrills, terror, enthusiasm, powerful, in-control, horny, angry, lighthearted. The key to being a successful writer is therefore more about a kind of sociopathic manipulation than anything else. You need to use their weaknesses against them, be ruthless.

4. Who reads?
People who feel stupid and have heard that reading makes you smart. Hyper-emotional but repressed people who want to feel the thrills that people who write can conjure up for them (see previous point). People who are afraid of the Internet. The lonely who have given up on human companionship but still want words written by a human even if they don’t have one with them in the room. Note that for them to become legitimate 5+ books-a-month readers they also have to have attention-spans, meaning that they have to be older than 30 in addition to all of the above.

5. What they want To write for these people, this little club of aging squinters you need to be aware of why they read. You need to throw in enough seemingly arcane knowledge that they feel smart. You need a touch of mawkishness to appeal to the old women, a body-count for the men, and a strong, courageous tom-boy female character to appeal to women who wish they were strong, courageous tom-boys. She should be a quirky redhead, by the way.