Stories are needy things. They have heavy co-dependencies, and we need to talk about that.

There's a degree to which we writers need to come to terms with our illusions. It's in our minds that we are the ones that determine the story — we portray the characters, we place them in the events we choose, we let them act inside those events to develop the story, we craft them together into a coherent plot with causality that mediates between the individual events and the story as a whole, etc. That stuff. All that is in the hands of us writers, so it's us who determine what the story actually is.

The story's on us, right? Well, nope.

Why? Because a story needs a reader every bit as much as it needs a writer. Without readers, stories are latent, inert — just static words on a page, without any capacity to do anything, affect anything. They're dormant, waiting, waiting for something to happen, for somebody to do something. They need a reader.

Readers do things that are beyond the power of the writer. Without a reader, storytelling is not possible.

Grasp the parts into an intelligible whole #

The first thing the reader can do that a writer cannot is to grasp, somehow, the elements of the story into one intelligible whole. The beginning, the middle, the end; the digressions and the twists; the characters, the actions, the events. Only the reader is able to 'grasp together' all these things and find meaning in them.

The reader has guidelines for doing this — the words themselves, which the writer has given them, is a sketch for reading; the narrative traditions of style and genre; the actual scheme of scenes, acts and turns, say. But in reading the story, the reader takes the latent capacity in the plot to be followed and turns it into a reality.

Follow the plot #

The text is a guideline for reading, but reader alone is the one who follows the plot, through all the eventualities and intrigues, every act of the characters and every consequence, and find the whole in the parts and the parts in the whole.

The reader takes the narrative and 'actualises' it — takes its potential and gives it coherence.

Find the novel #

When a reader reads, all the previous stories are also present. Those previous narratives, all that earlier reading, determines what the reader expects in a reading. To some degree, they will be searching for those expectations to be fulfilled.

But the reader is also looking for novelty, hunting out surprises. In the act of reading, the reader plays with the story — pushes at the constraints, looking for gaps, for forms and language that creates space for the reader's creative imagination to fill.

Every reader has a different capacity for this, but it's how the reader enjoys the pleasure of the text.

Complete the work #

Without a reader, story is unfinished, a shadow of itself, a sketch for what it could be. In reading, the reader completes the work.

The reader, then, has one more thing the can do that the writer cannot — they can restore life to hibernating narrative.

That means that writers and readers are collaborators, co-conspirators in the huge earth-altering scheme to make sense of the world.

In front of the text #

The reader only has the text. At the moment of reading, the reader cannot quiz the writer to ask questions, to clarify things or understand the avenues and cul-de-sacs of the story. All they have is the text as a sketch for reading and they sit in front of it, naked, their own world, their own experience, their own creative and imaginative capacities brought to bear in reading.

In reading, the reader returns the story to the real world of acting and suffering, to the reader's own world, puts the two face-on and asks what the world of the text has to say about the real world of the reader. Can it help to understand? Can it refresh our eyes, widen our expectations? Or does it offer a false view, a disturbing alternative? The world of the text and the world of the reader examine each other, and both are altered in their intersection.

Literature alters everyday experience, and writers and readers are both responsible for it.