Investigate Conflicting Expectations

Stephen King’s counting rule in On Writing treats a split among readers, with some loving the ending and others hating it, as a wash, with the tie going to the writer. That holds when the disagreement is one of taste, when readers agree about what the book is trying to do and differ about whether they enjoyed it. It fails when the split is about the promise. If one reader hated the ending because they thought the book was a mystery, and another loved it because they thought it was a family story, the tie belongs with the opening chapters, which apparently told both stories.

A Work makes promises, and readers hold it to the ones they believe it made. A title, a cover, an opening paragraph or a genre signal sets up an expectation about what will be delivered. A reader who expected a practical manual and got a meditation may well report disappointment, while a reader who expected a meditation may report delight in the same pages. The cause lies upstream of both readers, in the signals the manuscript sent, and those are what to find before deciding whom to believe.

Neil Gaiman, in his 2010 Guardian list of rules for fiction, suggests showing a draft to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing the piece is. Readers chosen that way roughly match the intended promise, so their disagreements are more likely to concern execution. It is good advice for one stage, because at some point the Work will meet readers nobody selected.

The mechanism is probably promise and payoff (Practice 48). The first pages and the surface of the Work establish what the reader will track, wait for, and judge, and if two readers tracked different things, the manuscript gave them different things to track. Some disagreements are not about promises at all, and a diagnosis that finds no textual cause is allowed to conclude that the difference is one of taste. Nor does the Work owe every expectation a reader brings. A reader who wanted a different book may be reporting something real about the market and nothing real about the manuscript.

Practice. Take two readers’ conflicting responses to the same passage or the same book, and give them thirty minutes. For each, find the earliest place in the text, title, or packaging that could have created the expectation behind the response, and write it down as a quotation or a location. Then decide among three options: alter the promise, alter the payoff, or leave both and accept the cost.