In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 266.
We are taught, as writers, to look toward the ever-important “reader.” This person or group is a sort of gauzy, mysterious, all-knowing force that we must hook and satisfy, that we must not confuse or annoy. When I think of “the readers” I always picture a horde of middle-aged white ladies who came of age in 1987 and have matching haircuts and minivans (perhaps this is the version of a grownup that I failed to become and/or fear?) and will inevitably be disappointed by my book. “I didn’t think it would be so weird!” they will all say, while eating fried mozzarella sticks and drinking Chablis. These women are the social guardrails that my brain generates in order to keep me safe from scorn.
Your least helpful “reader” will be different from mine (clearly, I have some untreated social wounds from my eighties childhood trying to square my New Mexico upbringing with the versions of life I saw on television!) but I can bet that fear of judgement lurks in your brain too.
Having that group of imaginary people in the room with me while I write is deeply unhelpful. In fact, if I wrote for them, I would produce boring, un-me slop. I try to leave these imaginary women to their casseroles and garage clean-outs.
Instead, I have spent the last twenty years trying to get better and better at paying attention to my own joys and pleasures and questions in my writing. To admit that what I want, what feels right to me in a particular sentence, in the next movement of a scene, is what matters. That, for the first few drafts of a piece, my very own curiosity and instincts are the only things that matter. Every non-psychopath is well-equipped with self-doubt. The very act of writing at all can sometimes feel indulgent or insane. (Will anyone but me care about a Bigfoot romance novel? Should I be doing something that will earn money? Am I even capable of getting to the end of this thing?)
I recently read a magnificent novel called Crux (Riverhead Books, 2026) by Gabriel Tallent, which is about rock climbers in Joshua Tree, and what I adored so much was how full the world and the language of the rocks and the ascents were. Even though I can’t do a single-finger pull up or “trad-climb” boulders, I loved that book because it was written out of the author’s own obsession and experience and totally honest in-love-ness. That was a gift and a joy.
What I truly, truly believe is that getting good at listening to yourself, trusting yourself, is your most powerful tool by far because it acknowledges that the pages are the music, but you are the instrument. You make art out of the experience of being alive, out of the people and things that break your heart, save your life, crack you up, flip the lights on. You are your own first reader, your own most important reader. These are your pages. In a world that wants to focus-group, to funnel all of literature into a single hose of AI sewage, your real job—more than any technical skill—is to hear the sound of your own small voice and keep listening.
Ramona Ausubel is the author of three novels and two short story collections, including The Last Animal (Riverhead Books, 2023), which was a national bestseller and won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature prize. She teaches at Colorado State University.
image credit: Birmingham Museums Trust
