Loving the Reader by Serving the Work

Dorothy Sayers on a paradox of art-making.

Sep 03, 2024

Writing with Dorothy Sayers, my six-week online creative writing class, starts one week from today, on September 10.

“Love your reader” has been something of a catch-phrase in my teaching and writing about writing. I offer this principle as a corrective to our natural tendency to treat writing as a way to love and serve ourselves, or as a way to establish our place on a hierarchy. Learning to love your reader is a step toward the kind of self-forgetfulness that makes it possible to take real pleasure in the work of writing.

But one of the significant challenges when it comes to loving your reader is the simple fact that you probably won’t know who most of your readers are. When you’re writing a letter or composing an email or making a speech at your Rotary Club, sure, you’ll likely know your reader. But if you’re putting work out into the world, you don’t know who most of your readers are. So how do you love them? You love them by tending to the little patch of ground that is yours to tend, making it the kind of place that will do wandering readers some good when they pass through.

In her essay “Why Work?”, Dorothy Sayers puts it in terms of “serving the work” as distinct from “serving the community.” She writes,

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

Serve the community by forgetting the community. She gives three reasons for this paradox:

The first is that you cannot do good work if you take your mind off the work to see how the community is taking it – any more than you can make a good drive from the tee if you take your eye off the ball. “Blessed are the single hearted: (for that is the real meaning of the word we translate “the pure in heart”). If your heart is not wholly in the work, the work will not be good – and work that is not good serves neither God nor the community; it only serves mammon.
The second reason is that the moment you think of serving other people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains; you begin to think that you have a claim on the community. You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause, and to harbor a grievance if you are not appreciated. But if your mind is set upon serving the work, then you know you have nothing to look for; the only reward the work can give you is the satisfaction of beholding its perfection. The work takes all and gives nothing but itself; and to serve the work is a labor of pure love.
And thirdly, if you set out to serve the community, you will probably end by merely fulfilling a public demand – and you may not even do that. A public demand is a changeable thing. Nine-tenths of the bad plays put on in theaters owe their badness to the fact that the playwright has aimed at pleasing the audience, in stead of at producing a good and satisfactory play. Instead of doing the work as its own integrity demands that it should be done, he has falsified the play by putting in this or that which he thinks will appeal to the groundlings (who by that time have probably come to want something else), and the play fails by its insincerity. The work has been falsified to please the public, and in the end even the public is not pleased. As it is with works of art, so it is with all work.

You can’t always love your readers directly, but you can love the things you love, you can tend to your business, you can use the gifts and pursue your interests and longings and speak in the voice that is uniquely yours, trusting that somebody is going to need what you bring.

When I wrote the Wilderking Trilogy twenty-something years ago, the American reading public was not clamoring for swamp fiction. But swamp fiction was what I could do. That was my little patch of ground to tend. So swamp fiction is what I offered up. It is one of my great pleasures when somebody tells me that they didn’t know how beautiful a swamp could be until they read The Bark of the Bog Owl or The Secret of the Swamp King. Nobody knows they need swamp fiction until they get it.

The great gift of the writer is to say, “Dear reader, whom I love, I would like to introduce you to this other thing that I love.” You set a table, you host a party.

And lest I leave you with the impression that Dorothy Sayers was somehow antisocial, I will give her the final word:

The only true way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself part of the community and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought. Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work.

Starting September 10: Writing with Dorothy Sayers

Dorothy Sayers was one of the leading lights of the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction.” Few of her peers had such high literary ambitions. In Writing with Dorothy Sayers, we will learn from this master storyteller and put her techniques and methods into practice in our own writing.

Writing With Dorothy Sayers includes six short recorded lectures, six 60-minute live Zoom discussions, as well as a dedicated online forum for discussion and writing exercises.

Dates:
Tuesdays, September 10-October 15, 2024

Times:
1-2PM Central
Watch the weekly lectures (~30 minutes) at your own convenience

Cost: $97

Intended Audience:
Adults, college-age and up (there will not be a student cohort for this class)

This class, like all of my six-week classes, is included in The Habit Membership. Habit members don’t need to register.

Virtual Writing Rooms on Monday Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday
Thursday Evening, 7pm Central: Office Hours
Starting NEXT week: Writing with Dorothy Sayers (included in membership)

There's a place for you in this vibrant community of writers. Find out more about The Habit Membership here.

Jared Wilson’s Storied Life

Jared C. Wilson is an author of over twenty books and a popular speaker at churches and conferences around the world. His new book is The Storied Life: Christian Writing as Art and Worship. In this episode, Jared and I talk about the multi-faceted calling of a writer, and the ways that writing a means of transformation for the writer as much as a means of communication to a reader.