The Reader Is a Real Person

Why you should ask your friends to read your work

We don’t need to go through all the things that have happened in the last year and a half. Ew. Suffice it to say, for the first time in that period, I have the brain space to start this newsletter up again! To be fair, about a third of that break was intentional, so I could focus on my next book during a writing fellowship. Now, the latest draft of that manuscript is with my editor, as well as a number of early readers—more on that later—which opens up my schedule in ways I’d more or less forgotten were on offer. (Did you know there’s something called a week-end?)

Also helpful is that, at my request, my cadence writing for The Walrus has changed. Delivering a monthly column, on top of other work and life commitments, wasn’t sustainable for me. I’ve been lucky to get a steady stream of subscribers from their Substack even during my hiatus, so just to plug that gig for a second, especially if that’s what brought you here—I have a forthcoming piece on marriage narratives, and for my next trick after that, I’m hoping to write about sales tracks in publishing (lol). If you have a story you want to share, even if confidentially, please get in touch. It is my hope that such a piece will vindicate and disturb on a par with this essay on book cover design from last summer.

Today, I thought I’d talk about the writing-related question foremost in my mind: that I’ve started to share my manuscript with a handful of trusted early readers. All friends, all people whose work and taste I have great admiration for. It has been terrifying and gratifying and I can’t believe it took me this long to start doing it (again). Before my work was ever published, I would exchange work with people all the time. Then, sometime after I started pitching essays, I let it fall by the wayside. This was partly a function of writing toward timeliness and topicality, partly nonfiction displacing fiction as the main genre I wrote in, and partly drifting apart from the people who then composed my little writing circle.

By the time I started working on my first book, not only was sharing work no longer a part of my practice, but I didn’t really have a chance to do it at all—the timeline was too compressed. I knew, going into this second project, that it was something I wanted to build in at some point. But I was hesitant to actually do it. It took a nudge from my husband, who’d read the book before anyone else, as with my first book. I think he got the sense that I was getting a little too mired in market questions (ugh); ones that felt at odds not only with what I wanted the book to be, but also the way he had experienced the manuscript. (Which was also not as a neutral reader, but as its developmental editor.) He was the one who urged me to do what I’d said I wanted to do in the first place and start sending it to people. And he was right.

My goals and dreams for the book have been floating around without real-world anchors, hoping “the reader” feels this or “the reader” thinks that. Turns out, you can just ask. The reader is a real person. I’m late to the game here, but: before the book is a commercial product, it can and should be read by people who don’t view it as a (future) commercial product. Now, having tried it, I don’t think it’s something I ever want to skip again.

The book’s still out with a few friends, but so far, feedback from early readers has helped clarify my goals, confirm my own instincts, soften the sting of self-advocacy (and replenish my stores for it), and best of all, reconnected me with what I love most about the project and why I started writing it in the first place. It is incredibly valuable, and also just nice, to open up the creative process to your community, outside the matrix of publication or profit. And that goes both ways. By dint of my job, I get the privilege of being a lot of people’s “early reader.” But it’s good for the work in a different way for that exchange to take place outside of can I pitch you. Just a perfect, closed circuit of integrity-testing the writing on its own terms, rather than how it conforms to a publication’s voice or needs or style.

The other thing I’ve been doing—which is scarier, and maybe what I’ll write about next time—is sharing the thing, or parts of it, with people who are actually in it. This part of personal nonfiction is such a fun, fascinating ethical minefield. I’ve been very much enjoying exploring other writers’ codes as I hammer out my own.

I’ve also learned, by chance, that the e-book of my essay collection is on sale for $1.99! If you’ve enjoyed my work in any format—here, in The Walrus, or elsewhere—and have the funds to spare, your purchase would help my case for continuing to do this. (So would leaving it a quick rating on Amazon, Goodreads, and the like.) Lately, the news cycle has sometimes felt like the various subjects of these essays—DEI backlash, turmoil in the publishing industry, most recently Canada–US relations—surface in the headlines like a kind of evil Whac-A-Mole (a name I always have to look up to make sure I’m spelling properly). But yeah, there’s a whole essay in there called “Dead Or Canadian,” about the fraught cultural history and identity posturing between the two countries. It’s flattering to feel like the Cassandra who’s been talking about these things for a few years now.

I know a lot of unsubscribes will come from sending a newsletter after this kind of hiatus. No hard feelings; I get it. I’m subscribed to too many things, too. Until next time.