You’d think writers and readers would be similar folk. I mean, a writer is just a reader who creates stories as well as consumes them, right?

Not exactly.

I believe writers start off wired differently than readers, even if nearly all writers discover their drive to create sometime after they’ve been reading, perhaps even many years later. I’m probably the exception, in that I began writing creatively almost as soon as I could read; by six years old, I’d already written dozens of plays for my stuffed animals to act out, to entertain my brother and sister. Members of my family will tell you my drive to write creatively came from my casual relationship with the truth–apparently as a wee one, I told lies even when telling the truth would’ve been easy and painless, just to see what I could get away with and for how long. It’s no surprise to anyone in my family that I’m a fiction writer.

Certainly not all writers are liars, and the opposite is true as well, but I do stipulate that we’re wired differently than readers. Wanting to not merely appreciate what others have written but to be compelled to contribute your own prose or poetry marks you as a distinctive breed of cat. As with any other art form, the vast majority of people (outside of school) consume the written word without dedicating time to learning and practicing the craft of stringing those words together to convey thoughts, teach concepts, and evoke emotions.

The craft of writing is like any other art in this way as well: it’s completely subjective and at the mercy of the consumer of that art. Hit a reader on the wrong day, or the wrong hour/minute/second, and a book that others hail as wonderful will be trashed–inevitably in a public, online forum such as GoodReads or Amazon–by this individual. Who’s right? Everyone. As Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch often reminds us, “Everybody counts or nobody does.” So, everyone’s opinion is equally valid, which makes writers a little bit crazy and causes us to beg people who tell us they love our books to take a few minutes online to express that love and counterbalance the negative reviews haters somehow always have time to upload.

Because writers work in such a fickle, totally subjective medium, some of us can get fixated almost superstitiously on technical details of the craft in the belief that their stories will suffer otherwise. In actuality, readers don’t care about most of those details. An example I often cite is the writer who spends an inordinate amount of time deciding among punctuation options for a complex sentence: is it best to use a comma, semi-colon, em dash, or ellipsis, or break it into two sentences separated by a period? An old story about Marcel Proust claimed he could spend a whole day deliberating on whether to insert or leave out a comma in a sentence he’d composed.

Readers don’t care one way or another. If writers have done their job, readers are so caught up in the characters’ story that they rocket past that comma (or lack thereof) at 90 MPH. I’ve asked careful readers whether a book they just finished and loved was in first- or third-person or written in past- or present-tense. They couldn’t tell me–because those things don’t matter nearly as much as the things readers do care about. I believe three things motivate a reader to keep turning pages: the characters, the story, and the word choices. This is a three-legged stool, and a book won’t stand up and be loved without the trio fully represented. If writers can master these, their work will be loved by readers even as fellow (jealous) writers sneer about their lack of punctuation versatility.

So, my advice to writers is to remember what readers really care about and make that the focus of their craft. For readers, I only ask you to have a care for the writers who labored to create their art: take the time to let the world know about the books you love or, if you didn’t love it, consider what merits the book did have and be sure to mention those.