Is addressing the reader bad?

[ThisAdamGuy]

A few years ago, I got closer to being professionally published than I ever had before when a literary agent asked to see the full manuscript of Henry Rider: Clown Hunter. They ended up rejecting it, but they gave me some pointers for future submissions. One of those pointers was that you should never directly address the reader. Maybe this is some hard and fast writing rule right up there alongside "show, don't tell", and I'm the only one who'd never heard it before, but it's never sat well with me. For one thing, I think talking to the reader fits the tone perfectly in Henry Rider perfectly since 1. it's told in first person, so Henry is talking directly to the reader anyway just by narrating the story, and 2. it absolutely fits with Henry's personality for her to treat narrating the book like a standup routine.

But even in other types of books, I don't think there's anything wrong with addressing the reader. I get that you don't want to break the immersion by mentioning things that the narrator of the book wouldn't know about, like if Tolkien had said "You might have thought it looked like an airplane" when describing the eagles, but just saying the word "you" outside of dialogue doesn't automatically ruin a story.

 

[Juia_Darkcrest]

So was she talking like a 4th wall break here?

It all depends on the editor but that is a no no in most writing.

I do it all the time, not my MC but my (Somewhat Reliable Narrator). You can reword it to be a thought of your MC instead, which was what your editor was probably looking for.

Honestly I think it is dumb but unless you are deadpool, the 4th wall shall never be broken =P

 

[LeilaniOtter]

for example, here's a paragraph out of XNPC: "She smirked. That Hide in Plain Sight skill had saved her from countless headaches since she had unlocked it at level sixteen. Normally if you were caught committing a crime, you would have a bounty placed on you, and the guards would attempt to arrest you on sight. That had long since stopped being anything more than an inconvenience to her. Bounties were only active in the city you committed the crime in, and only lasted for about a week anyway. There were thousands of towns just like this one scattered all across Nyr, and a paraplegic turtle would have had a better chance of catching her than any of these guardsmen."

Going back and rereading it, nothing about that paragraph feels wrong or out of place to me. But maybe I'm wrong and it'll completely destroy my readers' sense of immersion when they read it. What do you guys think?

There's nothing at all wrong with this; you're just demonstrating a storytelling style. *^^* It might help matters, of course, if your whole work is done in the same style. I like it! It's not 4th-wall breaking; it's not even addressing the reader - it's addressing whoever it is the story is being told to, that's how you should look at this.

 

[LiteraryWho]

?‍
Given that some of the greatest writers in the English language have done so (Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, for instance), I don't think bad is the right word for it. It is certainly out of style, at the moment, but it can be done. That said, I think even he avoids using "you", which is perhaps excessively informal. It might be better to use, in your example, something like, "If someone was caught committing a crime, they would have a bounty placed on them, etc., etc." Using "you" in a story implies a framing narrative, which likely is otherwise nonexistent.

 

[Our_Lady_in_Twilight]

I think there's quality and then there's medium convention and the two don't always overlap. Consider how much of this forum is devoted to meeting the convention of web novels (1.5k chapters released once a day with waifu covergirls, no traction till 50 chapters etc.) It doesn't mean you're a bad writer if you don't follow these conventions, but it might make it harder for you to get a hit.

Online readers conditioned to Systems and gamified progression will naturally expect to have whats effectively a 'Wanted System' explained to them in author voice, but I can see how it'd put publications off for being immersion breaking. Probably the rewrite would be something like 'She'd been caught with her hand in someone's purse a few months back, and she'd only needed to hide out for a week or so before the guards forgot all about it.' Just to make it sound a bit more diagetic and less like a game rule.

I suppose the gist is, on here its not 'wrong' - it's a perfectly valid stylistic choice. But if you're actively trying to get published traditionally, its a case of playing the game by the rules.

 

[ElenaV]

Look, I read Henry Rider, you might remember me from the comments I gave. This is my humble toss.

Directly addressing the reader, given Henry's quirk, and personality, is very appropriate. That's exactly what she would do. I believe professional agents have a different metric, the kind that sells. And they like to play safe. So if something hasn't been tried, then the risk is an unknown factor. Publishers, like any other business, don't love unknown variables in investment.

 

[LeilaniOtter]

I think I'll add a footnote here too:

That was an incredibly stupid literary agent you took your work to.

 

[ThisAdamGuy]

That was an incredibly stupid literary agent you took your work to.

Nah, they were absolutely right in rejecting it. Apparently graphic body horror isn't appropriate for young readers. Who knew?

 

[LeilaniOtter]

Nah, they were absolutely right in rejecting it. Apparently graphic body horror isn't appropriate for young readers. Who knew?

I'm just shocked.
Adam, didn't you research who you were taking your work to...? *^^*
I'm going to create a thread to help people find an agent, I think.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Kelly (Strange Awakening) and Jack (Jack Diamond) frequently address the hypothetical reader directly - it's a perk of writing first person (though in the noirs that inspired Jack, the "audience" seems to be the character himself - he's telling himself how silly he's being or stuff like that).

Heck, it shows up in some classic stories even. One I have trouble getting into, The Worm Ouroboros did this a lot before it got into the main story (in a way that makes the reader kind of a part OF the story ... but then adds a buffer between the reader and the story... at least for me ... that makes it much harder to be engaged with). The late Peter David used this a few times to great effect in his non-series fiction (it would not have been appropriate in the Star Trek stuff, except MAYBE some of the Q-related stories - there Delancie made some asides to the viewer so his character doing it in print might fit as well).

 

[DireBadger]

It totally depends on how you play it.

I mean, look at Deadpool.

But not too closely, or he will try to show you something you don't want to see.

 

[Ruyi]

i think your paragraph is fine. if it's the only paragraph in the entire novel that does this though, i can see how it'd stick out. tonally i don't see an issue however, and the concept of addressing the reader is quite fun and very effective if you wanna be meta on purpose. there are books with the "reader" as separate characters or mentioned obliquely in the text. there are also those that acknowledge the audience directly, such as ORV and its use of the Fourth Wall, or the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and how douglas adams is always giving meta commentary.

i can understand that publishers might find it gimmicky, perhaps? but if it fits into the flow of your story, ehhhh just go with it.