Writing Stories With Heart is a series of musings on why readers connect with stories, and how writers can increase the odds that a reader will connect with ours.
I read Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto exactly 22 years ago, but I remember the experience of it still lives in my body, muscle-memory of the very best kind.
I can pinpoint the date not because I record every book I read, though I wish I could make myself do it. No, I know the date because I read it on my honeymoon, and it just so happens that we passed the 22-year mark last weekend.
But this is not a story of a wedding, a honeymoon, or a marriage. This is a story of the illicit affair I had with this book. I tucked myself onto the window seat, snug in a scratchy wool blanket in our tiny rental unit, looking out at the mountain we’d hike and bike on over the week, Bel Canto open on my lap. These moments felt stolen, since I was “supposed” to be spending the entire week in a mutual fawning fest with my new husband, or something. But he knew me and books, and himself and books - he sat in a chair across the room engrossed in some sci-fi or fantasy world. The two of us there, our marriage already open to literary lovers.
I don’t reread books, so parts of the plot of Bel Canto are long lost to me. I remember the unexpected romance between the ethereal, indulged opera singer and the straightlaced Japanese business man. I remember the young love between terrorist and translator. I remember footsteps on the roof. The rest is gone from my memory.
What remains is a sense that I had been swept up in the initial chaos and eventual new order of the plot, as if I too had been a guest at the party that became a hostage crisis. I also remember characters who were constricted by perceived unlovability who found themselves opening up to new possibilities. When I finished reading, I was exhausted and exhilarated; the very best combination of the physical and emotional.
How did she do it? This is the question that has stayed with me for the decades since. How did Ann Patchett give me that experience?
Well, she’s a brilliant writer, for one thing. But writing talent alone doesn’t make for stories that pierce a reader’s heart. It takes thoughtful deliberation, intentional decision-making, and a centering of the reader as we write.
When I say “centering the reader”, I don’t mean that we are only writing what others want. Not in the slightest. Creative writing comes from within us, the writer, bubbling up until it has to spill out, a river of words from our very souls.
We write for ourselves first.
But writing is conversation. Without a reader, the conversation isn’t complete.
I speak differently to my teenagers than I do to my mother. (Actually, I speak differently to one teenager than the other.) When we are telling a story, we gauge our audience. We consider what they are bringing to the table: life experience, knowledge, desires, dreams. We modify our communication based on the person who is receiving it.
When we write stories - true stories, made-up stories - we have to consider our reader. Not the throngs of consumers out there, but our reader, that one person who is the one we most want to receive them. Perhaps it’s a real person, or maybe it’s an avatar.
I wrote a middle grade novel specifically for my daughter.
I wrote an essay specifically for a woman - any woman - living in the grief of pregnancy loss.
I’m writing this post, this very one, to an emerging writer, one with a story they long to see in the hands of someone who will put it down and feel like I did when I finished Bel Canto.
It may have been a right-time, right-place miracle for me to pick up that book that week.
I’m not saying that Ann Patchett had a 30-year-old newly married woman who still believed that she was inherently unlovable despite evidence to the contrary in mind when she wrote it.
But I like to think that she did.