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If only writing were like riding a bike, swimming, driving a car, or roller-skating. Once learned, we never forget how to do it. Unlike climbing a mountain and planting a flag on its peak, the writing process consists of mental mountain climbing where there is no peak to reach. Rather, we encounter only a series of plateaus of elevation. Two factors often inhibit the writing process: fear of criticism or failure and the need to impress the reader. Our awareness or sense of permanence associated with committing ideas to paper or the computer disk can produce in us feelings of anxiety and lead to procrastination. We are often reluctant to reveal our thinking on paper because any resulting criticism either from superiors or readers will reflect negatively on our ability to think clearly and logically. We are what we write, or perhaps what we seem.

Often only through our writing do others know us. So it is natural for us to become concerned about the image we convey. In a way, as writers we are similar to movie stars who wince at the thought of an inferior performance or ill-chosen role captured forever on film. We too can easily dread that what we write today may haunt us tomorrow. If the actor or performer who claims he or she never reads reviews cannot be believed, business writers who try to convince themselves that they write only for themselves, the reader be damned, are not to be trusted as well. With the exception of what we record in a diary, writing is meant to be shared with readers. Writing is a dialogue with our readers, not a monologue.

Since the days of our earliest English classes, we writers have been especially prone to the tyranny of the red pen. It is not surprising that we can become traumatized, so to speak, about exposing our thoughts to the public reader. No one enjoys being criticized negatively. If fear can paralyze the bravest soldier, it is no wonder that the freedom of expression and spontaneity essential to effective writing is vulnerable to being stifled from within. The greatest writers from Shakespeare to Dickens to those of our own time have often shown us the strongest prisons are those without walls and steel bars and doors, they are the mental and emotional interior ones we create for ourselves.

If you walk into A store looking for a new computer and the first salesperson you meet immediately points to a group of computers and says, “Any of those are good,” and then walks away, there is a good chance so will you, and with good reason. Why? You were never asked what you were seeking, how much you could spend, or if the computer would be used for business or pleasure or your child’s homework assignments. In brief, the salesperson never considered or asked about your needs and preferences. Just as it would come as no surprise to learn the salesperson who was indifferent to a potential customer’s needs was soon out of a job, the same holds true for writers who ignore their readers.

The reader is the writer’s “customer” and one whose business or approval is one we need to seek. The more you know about your reader, the greater the chances you will meet his or her needs and expectations.
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