A reader.

… Then the reader will love your story. By the way, who is the Reader? Have you ever met this man? Is he an important person? Well, any text needs a reader, because the most essential goal of the text it communication. People write texts to tell something  to someone, which means that a text is written for someone to read. Even if the only reader of this text is its author himself. 

It’s obvious that an artist wants the recognition; he wants a reader to love his texts. One may say that there are a lot of writers who write just because they can’t live without writing. So they write for themselves, not for the others, it’s their way of relaxation, their way of self-expression, their way of struggling with fears etc. But we don’t talk about those writers now. We want to know what makes a reader like a text, how a writer becomes a magician who can play with reader’s mind and feelings, who can upset a reader or send him to the seventh heaven of delight without even looking into his eyes.

Do you remember this wonderful feeling of being “inside” a movie or a book while watching or reading it? It’s a moment when the Universe is broadening and the reality of a book or a movie becomes your own reality. Sometimes there is a character who seems to be very close to your personality or who you would like to be, and you start feeling all his/her emotions, worries, and thoughts inside yourself. Sometimes you keep your personality for yourself but you live in the world of the book or the movie, you go along with its characters or its author, you follow them everywhere from bloody battles to profound soliloquys. You are omniscient like the author.

So how an author becomes that magician who makes us forget about our world and our reality? First of all, we should trust a magician to believe his tricks. He should be just one of us, an unremarkable stranger in a grey coat, who you could invite for a dinner. He might not know what the distance is between the Earth and the Moon and he had never played cribbage before. He is not the God and he isn’t even a professor from your university. He writes not to teach or to lecture you, he writes to share something that is important for him and as he assumes might be important for you as well. He is a good company for the evening and you absolutely trust him. Because a true magician has a talent to escape, to vanish in the air of his book so insensibly that you even don’t notice it.

Secondly, a writer has his powerful magic. He can build cities and create people; he can color the sky and the trees and destroy worlds, using only small black letters on the white sheet.  He gives you small details, hardly noticeable strokes of the paint brush and suddenly you feel the wind blowing into your face; you smell fried potatoes from the kitchen; you see shining eyes of a young girl on the other side of the street. Wall after wall, leaf after leaf, drop after drop a writer builds a new world around you, which looks so real and interesting that you don’t want to leave it. That’s why I hate the last page of the book and the word “end” on the screen…