# Investigate Conflicting Expectations The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman Practice 88 · Part 9: Revision, editing, and feedback Canonical URL: https://inkagai.com/the-inkagai-way/read/investigate-conflicting-expectations > When readers disagree, identify the different promises they thought the Work made. 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. --- Copyright © Anna Lishman and Brad Lishman. Published by Inkagai, an Algodyne Corporation product. This digital book is free to read and download for personal use. You may share the canonical public link and quote brief passages with attribution. You may not resell the book, remove attribution, or distribute modified copies as official editions. To quote: use up to 100 words at a time, and no more than 300 words in total from this book in any one article, post, or work. Credit both authors by name, as on the title page: Anna Lishman and Brad Lishman, *The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life*, `https://inkagai.com/the-inkagai-way`. Do not credit one author alone, and do not edit a quotation without marking the change. Longer excerpts, translations, audio editions, and adaptations need written permission through `https://inkagai.com/contact`. Writers quoted or discussed in this book keep every right in their own work. Their words appear here as brief quotation for commentary and teaching; they are not licensed for reuse by this notice. Quote them from their own books and cite those. No writer named here is affiliated with, or endorses, Inkagai or this book. Canonical home: `https://inkagai.com/the-inkagai-way`