The Internal Reader
Much has been said in writing circles about the internal editor, that little voice inside you that critiques every word you write, often while you are writing. Working with the internal editor is a process that every writer must understand in order to complete and revise drafts worth reading. But with so much attention focusing on that little voice, I think another internal voice is going unheard: the internal reader.
Writers read. Most of us got our start because we love to read (though why we write is a question for a whole other post). Whether we stick to one genre or style, it’s rare to find us without at least one book we are reading. I know that when I’m not drafting, I usually have two or three going. Right now I’m so busy with revision that I don’t have much time for reading, and I miss it.
Because we read a lot, we have developed what I call our internal readers. The internal reader is the part of you that has recognized patterns in all the prose you have devoured, gives you your tastes, and understands how stories, essays and poems flow in ways that your conscious mind has to work hard to catch. The internal reader appreciates good writing and disdains bad writing, not in the critical way that the internal editor does, but from an aesthetic standpoint.
The internal editor speaks loudly, so the problem it presents a writer is how to ignore it. The internal reader speaks softly, and a writer must learn to listen for it.
I discovered the voice of my internal reader during workshop feedback in my MFA program. It began when I noticed a pattern: if anything bothered me in my draft, if some part of the story or essay felt off in some way I could not describe, inevitably most people in the workshop would comment on it.
When I first noticed this, I assumed it was retroactive: they all noticed something, so I probably caught it on some level too. Then, when it continued, I wondered. I started circling in advance (on my own copy) the moment or two in a piece that felt off to me, and sure enough, those bits of text got called out every time.
Each time, there was no obvious technical flaw: no grammatical mistake, no point of view confusion, no clear mistake I could dismantle. I could spot the problem, but not quite put my finger on it.
The sorts of problems it has caught for me have come down to approach – narrative that works better as dialog, an image inconsistent with an image established fifty pages ago, a character interaction that does not quite suit a relationship. The flaw may center on a sentence, but repairing it requires revisiting the approach to the pages around it. An issue spotted by the internal editor might exist in a vacuum, but what the internal reader catches only matters in context.
So the next time you read through one of your drafts, you might want to listen for a little voice that asks, “is that right?”
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Submissions Update: Since I last posted, I have submitted to Apex.
