I’ve thought about this uncrossable gap from the reader’s side as well. A few years back, I read a book written by an eleventh-century Byzantine bureaucrat and historian, Michael Psellus, chronicling his turbulent times. (That the title was Fourteen Byzantine Rulers but only covered a century is a clue to just how turbulent.) It was, of course, originally handwritten, “publication” consisting of the manuscript being hand-copied by scribes, and distributed to a tiny audience of like-minded men. I read it in English translation, in an e-edition instantly available worldwide in unlimited quantities, on my tablet computer. Psellus could not possibly have pictured me as his reader, living a thousand years later on a continent he didn’t know was even there, speaking a language that hadn’t come into existence yet, in a technological future he could not have imagined. (That I’m female, to boot, might be less of an issue — there were plenty of literate Byzantine women, at least in the upper classes of his assumed readership.) And yet his words and thoughts were handed to me as freshly as if they’d been penned (though not typed) yesterday. I could see him; he couldn’t see me.
The Psellus book was a memoir, and so its author was presenting himself fairly directly to his audience, if in a self-edited fashion. Fiction adds a layer of veiling between creator and reader, ranging from a thin gauze to a thick stage curtain. People are naturally curious about anything hidden by a curtain, and always want to peek. (When thinking about this as a shy writer, I always channel that famous line from the Wizard at the climax of the movie The Wizard of Oz — “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”) But if readers can’t get an actual look, they will make up the writer in their heads, constructed from their own knowledge and expectations much as they mentally construct the fictional characters they’re reading about.
I got an accidental peek at this process many years ago at a science fiction convention, where I fell into a conversation in the booksellers’ room with a (male) reader who was very surprised to discover I was a woman — by whatever assumptions, he had not processed my name on the cover as female. (This, I later discovered, is not uncommon in my foreign-language translations, where the genders of English names are less recognizable.) Quickly, before his mental image was overwritten by our encounter, I got him to describe the author whom he had imagined had written the books he’d enjoyed (Vorkosigan Saga science fiction stories, at the time.) It included some odd details — male, mid-thirties, dark-haired, East Coast upper class — rather like my fictional character Ivan Vorpatril, really. Nothing at all like the beleaguered (if also mid-thirties) Midwestern housewife and mother I actually was. Yay curtain.
Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.
October 2, 2025
QotD: The gap between the author and the reader
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