Guest Post: How to Romance Your Readers | Writerly Life

This week we have a return from writer and creative writing instructor John Yeoman, who last wrote here at Writerly Life about defying Darwinism in writing. It was a wonderfully informative take on improving one?s writing, and this week?s post is no different. Today Dr. Yeoman writes about how to romance your readers.

How to Romance Your Readers ? The ?Mirror? Technique

As novelists, do we always write about ourselves? Our character may be a mafia don, nun, pearl fisherman or ? in a sci-fi novel ? a thinking blob of mud but, however we camouflage ourselves, it?s us. Isn?t it?

First-time novelists notoriously write their autobiography behind a very thin disguise. When they?re into their tenth novel and the best-seller lists, they?re still doing it, albeit with more skill.

When Patricia Cornwell presents her medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta as a chip of ice ? all business, no humour ? we see Cornwell herself. We may admire her craft work as an author but we wouldn?t invite her to dinner. But when Kathy Reichs gives us Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist in a comparable job, we warm to her fallibility and dry wit. We?d just love to go to Reichs?s barbecue.

I?ve never met those authors so I don?t know if my judgement is fair. But it?s the perceptions of themselves that they present through their protagonists. By bonding with the main character(s), we bond with the author. And if the author is just like us, or how we?d like to be, we become a lifelong fan.

That truism is more than philosophy 101. It gives us a practical way to write stories that our readers will engage with at once. They?ll have no choice. Why? Because, in the depiction of our main character, the reader?s ?I? or ?eye? in the text, we will inevitably present some facet of ourselves. Why should the reader care about us, the author?

Because we can disguise ourselves as them!

One way to do it is to pattern our protagonist upon our target reader ? not as they really are but as they would like to be. ?Cozy? detective stories typically feature an amateur lady detective of a certain age. To strangers, she appears sweet, dull and utterly unmemorable. But show her a mystery and she?ll dive into a thrift shop and emerge, metaphorically speaking, as Superwoman.

Her prototype is Agatha Christie?s Miss Marple. The Marple stories can be enjoyed by people of all genders and backgrounds, of course, but their core readership is ladies of a certain age. (Superwomen indeed, although their menfolk will rarely admit it.) For menfolk, Christie created Poirot. We might think him a buffoon on his first appearance but, oh, those little grey cells!

Tom Clancy?s thrillers aggrandize the antics of young men, macho, lusty and obsessed with military gadgets. That?s his readership. (To be sure, he throws in a few token Amazon warriors and stiff-lipped wives to placate his female fans.)

Pattern your main characters on your readers.

How can you do this? Mentally picture the person you are writing for. If yours is a ?genre? story, draw up a profile of the typical reader of, say, romance, sci-fi, paranormal mystery, crime (of every flavour), historicals and the like. And examine their tastes. A Google search along the lines of ?historical fiction readers demographics? can be highly revealing.

For example, one in two historical fiction readers have university degrees. Did you now that? It?s entirely different from the demographics of many other genres. What?s more, the stories most favoured by both US and UK readers feature a notable (real) person who lived in England in the 13th to 16th centuries and engaged in an adventure that was recorded in history books. Female readers like an undertone of romance while men opt for a military angle. (Source: AWriterofHistory.com)

So your ideal protagonist would be an erudite soldier, prominent in the Wars of the Roses (mid 15th century), and warring at home with a feisty woman. Her role can be played up or down according to the gender of your target reader. What real historical characters fit that profile? How about William Hastings, who was knighted at the Battle of Towton in 1461, and his strong-minded wife Katherine Neville?

Sounds perfect! Unfortunately, Ken Follet got there before us. His historical adventure Pillars of the Earth, featuring those real characters, sold 18 million copies. How could it fail? It profiled its target readers exactly.

Model your protagonist on your ideal reader and your protagonist becomes the reader?s ?I? or ?eye? in the text. It?s the character they?ll bond with.

Writers of Edwardian mystery thrillers knew that very well. They would often portray their Hero as a clean-cut young Englishman from a minor public school, a sports all-rounder, not very bright but pure of heart. His significant other was a beautiful virginal heiress, temporarily down on her luck. Even the lowliest clerk or shop girl ? the typical readers of Edwardian pulp fiction ? could bond with the Hero or Heroine. In their dreams, that?s who they were.

Is that approach a formula??

Yes. It was long-whiskered even by the turn of the 20th century. H. Rider Haggard lampooned it wickedly in his hilarious Mr Meeson?s Will (1911). But the formula works. Haggard had previously used it, without a blush, in his adventure novels that sold more than 100 million copies.

Look at any escapist modern novel and you?ll find some variant of that pattern. The reader is given an ?I? or ?eye? in the text to escape into. If the protagonist is just like themselves, or how they?d like to be, the job?s done.

It?s the secret of a great conversation. Stop talking about you. Start talking about them. And it works in novels too. Write about your reader. You can?t help writing about yourself, of course. Your characters will always be you, however you disguise them, so your ego will be suitably gratified. But, like Rider Haggard?s, your novels might sell 100 million copies.

Dr John Yeoman, PhD Creative Writing, judges the Writers? Village story competition and is a tutor in creative writing at a UK university. He has been a successful commercial author for 42 years. His free 14-part course in writing fiction for profit can be found at:

http://www.writers-village.org/master-course

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