Saul Bellow once remembered that John Cheever told him that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. "If I couldn't picture them, I'd be sunk," he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging John Updike to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. "When I'm not writing, I listen to the electricity," he said. "It keeps me company. We have conversations." Today we writers seldom get letters from our readers. We must try to get some encouragement from Facebook "friends". And instead of a humming electric typewriter we find company in the computer. Very soon it will start to talk with us. Hopefully console, not chide us for our mistakes.
Try to picture your readers, booting their computers every morning and subsequently looking for some notes and quotes. Then you will hear the sound of interest, enthousiasm and even applause!
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