Define the Reader’s Change

Montaigne begins the Essays by telling the reader not to expect much. The note “To the Reader,” dated 1 March 1580, says the book has “a domestic and private end”: he has made it for kinsfolk and friends, so that after his death they may recover some traits of his humors. “Myself am the matter of my book,” he writes, and there is no reason for the reader to spend leisure on so frivolous a subject. The promise is made by refusal, and it is exact about the intended reader (someone who knew him), the experience (recognition of a person), and the limits (no borrowed beauty, no service).

A writer who can’t say what a reader will have at the end tends to produce pages that inform without orienting. The reverse failure is a cover, a title, and an opening that promise one thing while the pages deliver another. A book that presents itself as a practical guide and turns out to be one person’s memoir of a failure will be judged a poor guide whatever its merits as memoir, and the reader’s disappointment tends to be read as a defect of quality when it is really a mismatch of contract (Practice 88).

What the work offers might be a feeling, an understanding, a doubt, or the ability to do a task. No writer can guarantee that anyone changes, so this is a promise about the offer. It is different from a message or a moral (Practice 20), and it is not pandering, since it holds whatever a given reader demands.

Nor does a promise give the writer control over the reader. Montaigne wrote for kin and friends, and strangers have been reading him ever since. A discovery writer may learn what the promise was only after a draft exists, and the promise should be revised when the first real reader reports what she experienced. Stated, it is the standard for judging cuts, additions, sequence, and the opening.

Practice. Write the promise in one sentence: “A reader who finishes this will [feel / understand / be able to / question / see] ___ that they could not before.” Use a verb for the change; “the importance of resilience” does not count, because it has no reader in it. Then read your first page and your last page and ask whether the first makes the promise and the last keeps it, finishing inside twenty minutes. If you can, give only the opening to one reader, ask what they expect to get, and set their answer beside your sentence.