So much writing I see seems to assume the reader is automatically bagging whatever the writer is mowing. In which case, why are you writing it in the first place? And why are they reading it?
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg recently re-ran a column he wrote years ago, about a fellow Chicago writer, who asked him to critique a chapter of a book he was writing. “Read it like you hate me,” Lee Bey told Steinberg.
Steinberg liked the phrase because it invited his “true opinion, the criticisms you would lovingly tote up reading the work of somebody you loathed.”
Yes.
But I think this concept has a much broader application for writers: We should write everything as if to a reader who despises us.
No, that’s not it. That’s too hard.
We should write it to a reader who likes us, but who reads us with a discerning mind—who has criticized us before when we’ve gone too far, or not far enough. Missed the point or made the point with a sledgehammer when a surgical mallet would have done. Said something barbaric on the one hand or smarmy on the other.
And then when we’re finished writing it, we should then reread it through the eyes of someone we know and respect, who we think is disinclined to agree with this particular thesis—and toughen it up, accordingly.
And then we should reread it through the eyes of someone who thinks we’re really full of shit most of the time (assuming we have such people in our lives; and we should).
Whether or not we force concessions out of those latter jagoffs, our work will be much stronger for our trying. It’ll be more irritating to our intellectual combatants and more valuable to our comrades, who must defend our ideas too, if they’re going to agree with them.
My late adman dad’s best pal Carl Ally made a famous commercial for Volvo in the 1960s, promoting the car’s toughness by urging customers to “drive it like you hate it.”
I’m urging writers who want to achieve more than filling LinkedIn and other electronic shitcans with happy blather that moves no one:
Write it like they hate you.
Well-said. And I love the Volvo ad —my first car was a 1963 Volvo P1800. Loved that car.
You make a very good point —you CAN’T write for people who hate you. (Though you can read another’s work as if you did). I’ve had to react to books from good friends, and to me, the greatest compliment was to deliver the bad news, difficult as that was. I remember the late Jeff Zaslow, a very good writer, generally, asking me why I hadn’t written about his latest, “The Girls from Ames.”
“Too many girls from Ames,” I said —I had. trouble keeping all the characters straight. Anyway, thanks for the piece.