Collaborating With Your Reader

[This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

Here’s a pet theory: A book never read is, by definition, incomplete. This sounds like a philosophical problem—a book falls in the woods … —but I’d argue it’s literally true.  

Writing is a collaborative art form between writer and reader. The writing itself is just words on pages. It’s not a finished experience. The reader uses their own imagination to complete this process. The story almost literally comes alive within their mind. This is why we, as readers, become attached to characters—we feel they’re now part of our lives.  

It’s a kind of magic trick. But crucially, we’re not casting a spell over our reader. We’re helping them cast a spell over themselves.   

The snag is—and this is why writing requires skill—if we don’t provide our reader with the right stuff (pick your metaphor: scaffolding or ingredients for this spell), they can’t do their part of the collaboration. Just because you, the writer, can see what’s going on in your head, doesn’t mean that your reader can. Readers easily get confused, are unable to picture situations, can’t understand the characters, and ultimately feel nothing.  

Anticipating your reader’s experience, moment by moment, as they move through your sentences is crucial. You have to know what exactly they will need and when they need it. This is, no exaggeration, the most important skill for a writer.  

This might sound daunting, but it’s not. How do we, as writers, help our readers in this magical process? Here are some ground rules I use to help my students and coaching clients: 

Writers often want to create a cinematic experience for their readers, but what they end up writing is similar to a screenplay (lots of dialogue, not a lot of setting). However, if you’ve ever read a screenplay, you know reading a script is not actually similar to watching a movie. Which is why people don’t often buy screenplays, but they do like to watch TV shows and movies.  

One of the crucial differences between a screenplay and a movie is in the creation of a physical world. On screen, the camera captures the space (setting), often with an establishing shot, and it picks up clothing, facial expressions, characters’ overall appearance—it shows “blocking” (i.e., where the character is in the space, and if they’re moving around the space). And I haven’t even mentioned sound yet! Usually, before a character has opened their mouth to speak, the viewer has been given a huge amount of information about the people and the setting.  

As writers, we don’t have the shortcut of a camera and a microphone, so we have to actually describe all of that stuff if we want the reader to be able to do their part of this collaboration.  

Hence the opening of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:  

By the end of that paragraph, we know something unsettling is happening, but we can also see and smell the place—multiple senses are always helpful in setting. We’re already there with the character, even if we don’t know who she is yet.  

This need for description is also true of people. Have a look at the opening of Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, which begins with an extraordinarily complex party scene. Patchett masterfully manages the space, while deftly describing lots of people, and handling the very complex blocking (i.e., all these people moving around the party). Not an easy way to start a book, but she pulls it off with style. Of course, she starts by dangling conflict in front of the reader: “The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.” 

PRO TIP: Quick and effective setting is especially important in speculative and historical fiction, where getting a reader grounded in the world is of the utmost importance. This can seem laborious, but often these physical spaces are hard to picture, and in order for the reader to “enter” the space, some very specific descriptions are needed.  

This might seem obvious, but a surprising number of people accidentally hide the source of tension in their story. Your reader wants to be engaged, but they won’t be able to figure out what’s wrong (the problem/conflict/tension) in this character’s life unless you make it clear.  

In Hitchcock’s famous description of how suspense works, he describes a group of men sitting around a table talking about baseball (yawn, no offense!), and then suddenly the table blows up. That would be surprising to the viewer, but there was no suspense.  

Try again, but this time, before the men even sit down, the camera shows the viewer that there’s a time bomb under their table. Now, as they talk about baseball, we’re riveted, hoping that one of them will discover this bomb and alert the others, or something will happen to avert the crisis, or we’re wondering if one of them already knows. We’re leaning in.   

The point is that the information which creates tension (a bomb under the table, or, say, that Grandma, a fancy lawyer, has helped a client commit a crime, and is now under investigation by the FBI) should be unambiguously visible to your reader as early as possible. The first sentence is a great place to put your source of tension. In The Hunger Games, we’re told in the first paragraph that it’s the day of the “reaping,” and while we don’t initially know what that means, it doesn’t sound pleasant.  

Or, consider the opening of Lee Child’s first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, which opens, “I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee. A late breakfast, not lunch. I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain.” Now, I have questions (I always have questions at the opening of a Reacher novel), but I can definitely see Reacher’s problem here.  

PRO TIP: It’s not necessary to introduce the main source of tension at the opening of your story, just a source of tension. A lot of mysteries do not open with the dead person, but instead focus on difficult (but lower-stakes) social problems—a quarrelling couple, or a detective who’s in trouble at work. The reader knows that they’re reading a mystery, so a dead person is forthcoming (that “bomb under the table”), and the reader is happy to focus on another form of drama, which will play alongside the mystery.  

Readers are smart in some ways, and not so smart in others. One strength: Readers pick up very subtle emotional cues, a terse glance between two characters, and we remember what we noticed for a remarkably long time. 

A lot of writers want to be subtle, which is admirable. But the strength of exposition is in managing information, so if you want to render the physical world and introduce tension, you probably have to let your narrator narrate. Put another way: Sometimes the best choice is to tell, not show.   

For example, if you fail to just tell us that your characters are eating dinner on the patio, then we will be confused when they are all swatting mosquitoes at the dinner table (is a window open?). Likewise, if you don’t tell us or show us that the grandmother in this family is a no-nonsense high-powered attorney, then we will be confused when she storms off to take a call from a client. What kind of client? we might understandably wonder.  

Crucially, readers given large gaps in key information will tend to supply answers from their own imaginations. This is, after all, a collaboration. If you don’t do your half of this work, your collaborator will do more than their half. Absent another explanation, we might decide the window is open and that the grandmother runs a real estate business, and we’ll be annoyed and feel misled when we realize we were wrong on both counts.   

If the narrator refuses to participate in direct exposition, the story first becomes confusing. Then the characters, as if now aware that they’re in a story and a reader is perplexed, begin saying strange things in order to inform us (the readers they’re not supposed to know about!) what’s going on.  

Please no.  

Let the narrator handle this job. A shy narrator will avoid telling or narrating, which will confuse the reader.  

PRO TIP: Sprinkle tangible objects and vivid physical descriptions into your exposition to make it feel like you’re showing, not telling, even though you’re definitely telling. For example:  

To be sure, you can go overboard with any of this. And this is especially a hazard in science fiction, where, because of the complexity of your story’s setting and (often) the unique social order of this invented society, there’s a temptation to just go on and on about every aspect of the world’s operation.  

But again, you want to be a bit of a mind-reader for your reader, in order to collaborate effectively. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice at some point that the reader’s mind is shutting down.  

As always, you have to feel for your reader’s limitations and stop before they cry mercy.  

Instead of rendering the whole world, try to help the reader enter the exact space that the primary character is in during the opening scene—the cockpit of the spaceship, say, instead of the whole spaceship. The character isn’t experiencing the whole spaceship, after all, they’re looking at what’s in front of them. 

Ultimately, you want to get your reader just enough awareness to enter the story. The rest can come quite slowly. Again, consider The Hunger Games, where we’re still learning crucial details of how the world operates throughout the first 100 pages.   

All of the above is made vastly easier if you just trust your narrator’s voice. Let their personality come forward. The above description of Betty’s “idiot client” lets us know that Betty is tough and smart, or a bit mean and condescending. This voice, or personality, will help your reader acclimate to the world that they’re summoning with your help.   

Consider the narrator we meet in the opening passage from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel When We Were Orphans:  

By this point, I’ve figured out a lot about who this guy is, not based on much more than the personality and interests on display. Obviously, it’s England, 1920s, but we can also infer from the words chosen and the sentence style that our narrator is formal, ambitious, well educated, confident, but not wealthy.   

This kind of closer narration—in third person or first person—is often quite a struggle for writers, because it involves allowing a narrator to talk to the reader instead of constantly hiding behind dialogue and action. But with a clear narrator, the reader learns so much and so quickly.  

In Susanna Clarke’s 2004 bestseller Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, narrated in third-person omniscient, the reader still gets a sense of the environment and characters by way of the voice:  

Now, there’s actual magic, and this story is set 100 years earlier than When We Were Orphans, but the formality and personality of this narrator, who considers the papers “dull,” is vivid, and not unlike that of Ishiguro’s narrator. And we can assume that this narrator shares some of this personality with the main characters.  

Crucially, for the collaboration between writer and reader to work, writers must recognize that readers are astute in some ways (picking up on subtle emotional cues, monitoring subtle conflicts) and easily confused in others (e.g., keeping track of lots of characters, staying oriented in time and space).  

Writing is about feeling the experiences, moment by moment, of your point-of-view character, almost inhabiting them. But at the same time, your mind is elsewhere, focused on the experience of your reader.  

We’re trying to mind-read in two directions at once: to enter our point-of-view character, and, at the same time, our reader. This is, surely, why the act of writing requires so much concentration and is so engrossing. But ultimately, the writing exists for the reader, so we have to focus on them and help them do their part of this collaboration.