My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point- whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell. -David Simon, 2007
Simon: Fuck the average reader
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As literal as marching bands, those average readers. And what of narratives with hide-and-seek plots, plot-less plots, and metaphors galore? Fuck average readers and their grade-school English teachers.
Witold Gombrowicz (of all people) raised the specter of the average reader in a letter to Bruno Schulz, referring to her as the hypothetical “doctor’s wife from Wilcza Street.”
In response, Schulz wrote a ~10 page paean to the doctor’s wife’s thighs.