Are You A Helicopter Writer?

You can’t be all things to all readers. If you to try to do so, then, Writer, you’ve just found a shortcut to being nothing to no readers.

In my capacity of writing coach, teacher, and author, I’ve noticed an increasing anxiety among the writers I work with when it comes to their relationship to their readers. Frankly, they’re terrified. One of the biggest challenges facing professional writers today is navigating the minefield that is the Internet. There is no roadmap for this, and very little mentorship. It is, indeed, a brave new world.

Reader response to a writer’s work — or potential reader response — paralyzes many of them creatively and takes up the majority of their headspace.

Instead of thinking about their work, they’re obsessing over the wording of a tweet, combing through each character to make sure it won’t ignite an inflamed response. They’re writing apologies about a manuscript before it’s finished. They’re censoring themselves before someone else gets a chance. They’re more worried about finding sensitivity readers than qualified critique partners who recognize that not everything in a book that is triggering is problematic.

Case in point: As I write this, I can feel my blood pressure rise, my chest tighten, my belly churn — all out of a deep sense of foreboding and unease that in saying any of this, I’m laying my head beneath the guillotine blade of The Readership. I fear that what I say will be taken out of context, one line cut and pasted into a tweet with an attention-getting hashtag, a neon sign to the culture vultures. I’m scared they will descend and that I will be left out in the cold, woefully misunderstood.

In fact, a disclaimer:

Dear Reader,

I am writing this piece in order to shed light on the ways in which literature itself is in danger and in an attempt to serve my community of writers, who are hurting. I am an ally of marginalized groups. Yes, I am a white woman. Yes, I am thus privileged. I hear you. I see you. I advocate for you. Please do not misinterpret what I am about to say — I’m on your side. I have your back.

Thank you for consideration,

Heather Demetrios

The fact that I felt the need to include the above is an example of helicopter writing. I am a helicopter writer, and if you’re writing in 2019, you very well might be, too. We need to be unafraid to have this conversation, and I’d like to open it up here and thus:

Writers, we have to stop apologizing for our work, and we must stop holding our readers’ hands.

Much of the anxiety I have just exhibited stems from cancel culture and the seismic shifts in publishing — particularly within the young adult publishing community — surrounding approaches to diversity, #ownvoices, the #metoo movement, and other important social conversations. Writers of all colors, nationality, genders, faiths, and any other group are fair game if they don’t stay within any individual readers’ boundaries of what they believe a writer can and can’t write. The pitfalls of cancel culture is a topic for an entirely different post — what we’re looking at here is not reader response, but a writer’s response to readers.

While this anxiety can often be a much-needed catalyst towards greater awareness of privilege and positioning, many writers are beginning to lose the ability to take ownership of their words, no longer allowing the work to speak for itself.

Writers have become defense attorneys of a sort, feeling the need to justify their work to every reader who demands satisfaction.

Are You A Helicopter Writer?

Whether you’re concerned about how your work is landing with readers, terrified of being #canceled, or uncertain about your author brand, it can be tempting to become a helicopter writer.

Much like helicopter parents, helicopter writers will do anything in their power to make life as easy as possible for their readers.

“Helicopter parenting,” writer Mike Brooks says in a recent Psychology Today article, “typically describes hyper-involved, extremely concerned parents who pay close attention to a child’s every move. They try to guide, coax, compel, or even force children to do what they think is “best” for him/her.”

Everyone is a critic — we know this, it’s a an age-old phrase that gets bandied about, but now has much more sinister and life-altering implications for artists today. The relationship between reader and author — a whole wing of literary theory called Reader Response Theory, studied in graduate programs the world over — is one that writers and their audience have been exploring since, likely, the beginning of the written word.

If you’re an author, the response your readers have to your work is valuable information — to a point.

It’s great market research, for one, and can help point out blind spots you may have about any number of things from race to gender to craft or story weaknesses. The reactions people have to your work can be a springboard for new work, better work, and a more informed approach to your genre and author brand. It can, in short, make you a better human.

I personally love nothing more than receiving emails or messages on social media accounts from readers who have been impacted by my work and have found it to be meaningful in their lives. These messages affirm that my inner writer’s compass is pointing to my True North. It’s deeply satisfying to see your intention for a work be realized through a reader’s experience. Responses that don’t land as comfortably — unfavorable reviews, criticism of all stripes — can sometimes be an invitation to calibrate that compass, but, more often than not, the general wisdom was always one of you can’t win ’em all.

I say was because the culture has changed dramatically, with social media making it increasingly easy for readers to interface with the writers they read.

What can sometimes result is public attacks on a writer’s character or motives — with very real effects on some of those writers’ livelihoods, from cancelled book contracts, to destroyed reputations, to books being pulled from shelves, sometimes at the publisher’s or even the author’s request.

Understandably, working writers today are scared. They don’t want to lose their jobs, their readers, the opportunity to share their creativity with the world.

I’ve been lucky to avoid some of the public whippings of writers I’ve witnessed online so far, but the fear of them is something all writers, myself included, now carry on their backs, along with their inner critics, uncertainty, self-doubt, creative blocks, and the other members of the writer’s inner entourage.

You know you’re a helicopter writer if:

Let me be clear: I’m speaking to writers who are writing authentically, with emotional intelligence and responsible stewardship and respect to other cultures and cultural wounds here — writers whose books should not be up for the chopping block of cancellation (Should any be? See: the Soviet Union). It’s important to be aware — especially if you’re a white writer — of whitewashing your book, or not being an ally of Own Voices. Moving forward, let’s operate under the assumption that you are, but that you may be struggling with being a helicopter writer.

• You believe it is your responsibility to make your reader comfortable.
• You see your characters as boxes to be checked in order to avoid being accused of whatever your readership might accuse you of (typically, Lack Of Wokeness): Characters of color? Check. LGBTQ+ Character? Check. Feminist Characters? Check. Non-toxic masculine characters? Check. In essence, you’ve become the very thing you’ve feared: a person who puts other people in prescribed boxes and allows the culture to dictate everything in your book, from the cast to story resolution to dialogue.
• You’re following the culture instead of critiquing it or holding a mirror up to it — in effect, your work is concerned with being in alignment with a set of already established viewpoints, much like Soviet Realism.
• You are more concerned about your readers’ feelings and sensitivity than being a truth teller. (If you are a bigot, I’m not talking to you. No, seriously, like ever. I’m talking to the writers who have done their due diligence and are producing good work that adds value to our culture and conversations).
• You’re afraid of readers and write or market from that place of fear, seeking to mitigate any potential misreading of the work by censoring it, or over-explaining your political or social positioning — whether in the work itself, or about the work when discussing it publicly.
• You sponsor a culture in which readers are allowed and encouraged to bully writers or you don’t speak up for fellow writers when they are unfairly bullied.
• You facilitate a culture that leaves no room for nuance, ambiguity, or the many liminal spaces in which personal growth, learning, and engaging with challenging ideas occurs.
• You hold the reader’s hand too much — taking away their opportunity to decide for themselves what they think about the ideas you are presenting in your work. In effect, you are committing one of the greatest sins of literature and critical work: you have become didactic.
• You try to shield your reader from discomfort, which is often fertile ground for their ideas about themselves and the world to grow.

Pitfalls of Performative Writing

For many writers, writing is a performative act. For them, the experience isn’t complete without an audience. There is nothing good or bad about it — being a performative writer is entirely neutral. However, it can have its pitfalls.

If you’re a writer who depends on reader engagement and positive reactions to your work, you might be devastated by a lack of response to your work, or less-than-stellar reviews. I know writers who spend countless hours reading their Goodreads reviews (something I discourage my clients from doing, unless they want a very large, very loud Greek Chorus in their heads as they write), writers who obsessively check their Amazon rank or BookScan numbers or otherwise seek affirmation from too many cooks, crowding their creative kitchen so that nothing truly delicious or original can be made in it.

Writers who do not create healthy boundaries between themselves and their readership, ones who can’t or won’t allow their work to speak for itself, run the risk of being helicopter writers who don’t allow for a reader’s independent experience of literature.

Let your readers be confused. Let them misunderstand you. Let them experience the full spectrum of emotions that your work provokes. This is your job. It is to not your job to tell them what to feel or think.

The most generous thing you can do as a writer, the greatest gift you can give your reader, is help them better articulate for themselves, through active engagement with your work, what it means to be human.

Don’t take that away from them.

Heather Demetrios is an author, writing coach, and teacher for scribes. She lives in Durham, NC with her writer husband and very imaginative Devon Rex cat. Her novels include Little Universes, I’ll Meet You There, Bad Romance, as well as the Dark Caravan fantasy series. Her non-fiction includes Codename Badass: A Feminist Pop Biography. She is the editor of Dear Heartbreak: YA Authors and Teens on the Dark Side of Love. Find out more about Heather and her books at heatherdemetrios.com and visit her on Twitter: @HDemetrios and @page_count. Her newsletter, The Lotus & Pen, provides resources for the writing life.