Your Readers Are Not Reading the Book You Wrote

What suggestive flowers and Wuthering Heights have to do with how your writing impacts readers

I have a lot of conversations with novel writers about authorial intent and reader impact. There’s the old cliche about literary analysis reading way more intent into classic literature than the authors ever actually intended, usually something along the lines of trying to discern the significance of the color of the curtains in a scene when the reality is that’s just what the author thought that character’s room would look like.

As an author, it’s essential to be aware that readers—including agents, acquiring editors, reviewers, and other industry pros—will misinpret your writing. It’s not only a possibility but very likely to happen with anything you publish.Subscribe

Every reader brings their own understanding of the world to how they experience your story. All the prep and planning and revising and feedback can’t stop that from happening. Just look at the Goodreads ratings for your favorite book. You’ll see plenty of people who hate the exact things you love about it.

Actually, scratch that. Don’t ever look at Goodreads ratings. It’s good practice for when your book is published. (It’s taking all my willpower not to digress into the larger conversation around letting go of your work when you put it out into the world.)

The good news is there are some steps you, the author, can take to make your intent as clear as possible—and gain some ride-or-die readers along the way.

Suggestive flowers

This is a fun and meaningful little rabbit trail. But if you just want to get to the point, you can skip the detour.

This weekend, I saw a Georgia O’Keeffe painting on loan at The Mint Museum. I have long been a fan of her work and also drawn a lot of inspiration from her contributions as an artist and feminist icon.

For reference, here’s the painting.

The museum label for the painting mentions that people—at the time, mostly men—often attribute eroticism to her flower paintings but over the course of her career, she denied that was her intent. If you know her work, you’ve probably heard this interpretation before.

The label also included a great quote:

Well—I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Which if you ask me is 12/10 troll comment to her haters. Not for nothing, I’d also like to point out her egregious use of em dashes, long before AI was a thing. I knew I liked her.

O’Keeffe insisted her paintings were about form and color. Period. It would be easy to dismiss this as internalized misogyny, given the understanding of gender and sexuality for women in the early 1900s (thanks, Freud). Except that O’Keeffe was well known for her androgenous appearance and general disregard for gender roles in her personal and professional life. Plus, her husband Alfred Stieglitz famously photographed Georgia O’Keeffe over 300 times, both clothed and nude. IMO those unflinching stares further cement her status as a badass.

Okay, enough Georgia O’Keeffe fangirling. (For now anyway. But you can always hit me up if you want to talk fearless gender-smashing artists of any flavor)

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It happens to books all the time

There are tons of examples of ways that classic literature has been misinterpreted compared to the author’s intent. Ray Bradbury intended Farenheit 451 to be about mass media overconsumption leading to a lack of critical thinking (sound familiar?). But the censorship chord is what really stuck with readers over the decades. The children’s book The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister is about sharing and friendship, but many readers interpret it as a story about being forced to give up the unique elements of the self in order to fit in.

I could go on at length about the 2026 Wuthering Heights movie billing the story as “the greatest love story of all time.” Don’t get me wrong. I love that book. But it’s not a love story. Yes, this is a hill I will die on.

“I want to make readers feel something”

Another version of this is, “I want to make readers think.”

But have you pinpointed what do you want your readers to feel and think?

This happens in layers, like most other elements of writing.

• There are the big-picture elements of theme and change and the overall emotional imprint a great book leaves.
• The building blocks of that are the ebb and flow of emotion as we read the story.
• Don’t forget those meticulously crafted (or complete whims of the muse) phrases that really stick in your reader’s brain.

But that doesn’t have to be left up to chance.

What does your ideal reader know?

There’s a lot of talk in publishing about your ideal reader. That’s because they’re the ones you’re writing for—the people who are going to get your references and laugh at your jokes and love your mood boards and love you forever.

But it’s not enough just to include those references. No, I’m begging you to take it a step further: Really consider how those references will make your ideal reader react.

Write what your reader knows

Genre, age category, the book cover, the names of the characters and setting—these are all signals to your reader that they know what kind of story this is. If you read many book reviews, you always see some that start with “I don’t really like this genre” and then go on to give a scathing review to the book in the genre they don’t like, and if you’re like me, you have to wonder why you read it then??

As the author, you want to think carefully about what you are communicating to your reader about what kind of story this is, what kinds of characters these are, and what the reader can expect as a result. This means all those elements I mentioned above + the narrative voice, level of interiority, and word choice on the page.

A lot of writers bristle at this, especially in the perennial “write to market” discourse. But like all discourse, this is only one part of the picture and there’s a lot more nuance. So, for us, this is just a starting place.

Think about associations

Readers make assumptions about what is going to happen in a book or what a book is like based on what they’ve read or seen in other stories. This is all tropes are—things that have happened before in books, movies, TV shows, and other media so that readers assume X will lead to Y. Some common, simple examples:

😏 only one bed = love interests have to share a bed, and we all know what that means

🧹old lady who lives in the woods outside the village = witch

💎only one item can make things right = quest for a MacGuffin

When you acknowledge the common tropes your target audience is familiar with—which includes pop culture, social media, and more—you gain an awareness of what your reader expects. Like a peek into their reactions. And that is author gold.

Lead with intent

When you know what your reader knows and what associations they will make based on elements of your story, you can lead them in the direction you want to take them.

• Want your reader to be scared for the MC? Take them into a basement, a dense forest, or another dark, isolated location.
• Want your reader to feel the chemistry between love interests? Have them fake date, be in forced proximity, or experience an unexpected spark when they touch.
• Want to indicate kids are going to have to fight the villain on their own? Show an adult be dismissive and/or useless in the ways that every kid sees.

So, yes, I advocate not only knowing tropes but also using them in the way the reader expects. At least to begin with.

Use those assumptions

You’ve nailed your signals about what kind of book this is. You’ve determined how your reader will associate elements of your story, and you’ve intentionally led the reader down a path where they know what to expect.

Or do they?

The best plot (or character or theme or whatever else) twists come when the reader is confident they have interpreted the clues correctly and then the author says, “Not in my house.” This is when subversions of tropes are most powerful. Some recent examples:

• You take the MC into a dark forest and everything feels creepy, but then they meet an eerily beautiful creature who may or may not be a love interest (Where the Dark Stands Still by A.B. Poranek).
• MMC kidnaps FMC but twist! FMC is actually an assassin (Slaying the Vampire Conquerer by Carissa Broadbent).
• The adults (well, in this case it’s the adultier adults) are not only useless but actively evil (This House Will Feed by Maria Tureaud).

Back on my BS

To bring this back to Georgia O’Keeffe (briefly, I promise), she learned that people (men) were going to interpret her paintings through the lens of their experience, and that meant they weren’t going to understand the breadth of her intent. She didn’t love it, but she also knew she couldn’t change it.

When she visited New Mexico in 1929, she was inspired to re-evaluate how she conveyed her fascination with form and color. She moved from the flowers she was famous for to desert landscapes and animal bones, both in watercolor and photography.

So, yes, Georgia O’Keeffe kept adjusting based on how she knew people perceived her work. But she never sacrificed her artistic vision to do so, and this era became her most prolific and the one in which she felt she grew the most as an artist.