Create a Powerful Reader Experience (I)

Which is your favorite, most memorable story? What has made it stay with you over the years? Do you recommend it to other other people and re-read it yourself? Do you remember how you felt when you first read it?

Stories become unforgettable for the strangest reason. The most powerful one is that you see yourself in the story. Or maybe the story showed you a world you have never thought possible, gave you an insight which enriched your life. Or the story may have given you a lifetime of hope and courage.

But it is hardly ever because the plot was complicated or the dialogues were perfectly written. It wasn’t because the pace was exact or the climax was edge-of-the-seat.

These can augment the experience, not create.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a wonderful example.

The Story

Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the 1930s. The story is narrated by Scout Finch, who is six years old when the novel begins. She lives with her older brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus Finch, a lawyer.

Much of the first part of the novel is about Scout, Jem and their friend Dill discovering the world around them. They play, quarrel, go to school, encounter the peculiarities of their neighbours and become fascinated by the mysterious Boo Radley, a man who lives shut away in his house.

Then the story takes a darker turn.

Atticus agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. As Scout and Jem watch the adults around them respond to the case, they begin to understand something they had previously been too young to see: the world they live in is deeply divided by prejudice and injustice.

The trial becomes the centre of the novel, but it isn’t the whole story. Alongside it runs the children’s growing understanding of courage, cruelty, compassion, prejudice and what it means to see another person as a human being.

How Has It Stood The Test Of Time?

More than six decades after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird remains one of the most widely read and loved novels in the English-speaking world.

It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. It has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 40 languages. In 2018, PBS’s The Great American Read, which invited millions of people to vote for their favourite novel from a list of 100, named it America’s best-loved novel.

But numbers alone don’t explain its longevity.

The world it depicts belongs to a particular time and place. The racial injustice at the heart of the story is rooted in 1930s Alabama. Yet the questions the novel leaves us with are not confined to that time or place.

How do we learn prejudice?

How do we recognise injustice when the people around us accept it as normal?

What does courage look like when you know you may lose?

And perhaps most importantly: how do we learn to see another person’s humanity?

Those questions haven’t gone away.

What Was The Reader Experience?

The remarkable thing about To Kill a Mockingbird is that the reader doesn’t simply learn about injustice. We experience the world through someone who is gradually learning to understand it herself.

At first, we are children alongside Scout and Jem. We are curious about Boo Radley. We are interested in the strange people in town. We are amused by Scout’s observations and irritated by the things children find irritating.

We feel safe.

And then, almost without noticing it, we begin to see the uglier side of Maycomb.

The reader experiences the injustice of Tom Robinson’s trial with a particular kind of helplessness because we understand more than Scout does, but we cannot intervene. We watch her innocence collide with the adult world.

There is anger. There is sadness. There is admiration for Atticus. There is fear and uncertainty around Boo Radley. And finally, there is something more complicated: compassion.

The book doesn’t simply tell us: This person is good and this person is bad.

It gradually teaches us to look again.

Someone we have feared may not be frightening at all. Someone who appears respectable may behave terribly. Someone who is powerless may demonstrate enormous courage.

By the end, we experience something Scout herself has experienced: we have learned to see people differently.

That may be the deepest reason the novel stays with readers.

What Did Harper Lee Do To Create That Experience?

First, she gave us Scout’s point of view.

That decision is enormously important. Scout is intelligent, observant and curious, but she doesn’t understand the adult world completely. We therefore discover Maycomb alongside her. Harper Lee doesn’t give us a narrator who explains the meaning of everything. She allows us to work things out.

That creates a powerful combination: the innocence of the child and the understanding of the reader.

Second, Lee didn’t begin by throwing us into the trial.

She gave us time to live in Maycomb.

We meet the children—and most of us became Scout. We meet their neighbours. We heard the stories. We become familiar with the town and its people. We become emotionally invested in this little world before its ugliness is fully revealed.

That matters because the trial isn’t happening in an abstract courtroom. It is happening in a place we have come to know.

Third, she lets the story’s major ideas emerge through events and people rather than lectures.

Atticus can talk about empathy, but Scout eventually understands it because of what happens to her. The children encounter prejudice rather than receiving a lesson about prejudice. They discover that appearances can deceive them.

And finally, Lee brings seemingly separate threads together.

Boo Radley begins as a childhood mystery. The Tom Robinson story appears to be something else entirely. By the end, those threads converge in a way that makes Scout’s journey complete.

The reader realises that the story has been quietly preparing us for this understanding all along.

That is a powerful reader experience.

What Harper Lee Hasn’t Done

She hasn’t relied on a complicated plot. She hasn’t filled every page with action. She hasn’t explained what we are supposed to feel.

She has controlled what we see, when we see it, whose eyes we see it through, and what we are allowed to understand along the way.

And that is where things get really interesting.

Because a powerful reader experience doesn’t happen by accident.

It is created by hundreds of decisions about story, character, information, pacing, perspective and structure.

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In the part two of this three-part series, we’ll look at another very different book—and another very different reader experience.

Mother of three adult, opinionated humans and two boisterous dogs. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity. Author coach and developmental editor. And a passionate bibliophile, of course.