I've talked this thing over with other fiction writers and I find it's a rather common experience. Several of them told me that throughout their careers as writers they have been conscious of this slowly developing faculty for self-criticism while at work.
Julian Street: I don't have my readers in mind at all until after the story is done—save that I always try to make things clear to a vague some one to whom I am telling my story. But in writing the story—the people in the story—are everything. I don't think of editors, either. I write to the severest critic I have inside me.
T. S. Stribling: A "reader" never enters my mind. I never give a hang whether anybody reads it or not, or what they think about it so long as I can get past the editor and get a check. I want the check because I can't live in idleness without it.
Booth Tarkington: I don't have readers in mind—only myself as a reader.
W. C. Tuttle: I suppose that a writer should consider the reader, but I have never done so; it has always been a case of story first; feeling that, if the story is good, the reader gets the real consideration.
Lucille Van Slyke: Your question hits upon the greatest snag in my attempt to write. I find it bothers me excessively to have to keep any reader in mind; it's a mental hazard to me to think of anybody that I know personally reading what I am writing—a perfectly childish stage fright. (I qualify this—I dearly love writing a story for a child.) I am scared to submit a story to an editor after I have met him—don't mind at all having it slammed at fifty editors I have never met. Realize it's foolish and feminine and illogical, but it's so. But I do try to visualize a sort of composite reader when I am revising. Example—just now I am doing a year's ghastly potboiling—a thousand words a day six days a week for a newspaper syndicate. Each day is a separate short story, all hinge together—climax each sixth—larger climax each month with a bang at the end of six months. This is the most disagreeable writing task that I have ever tackled. It's plain deadly. But I never sit down to it that I do not lay aside my usual writing method. Remind myself of this: Whoever reads what I am writing now is a person in a hurry. I will have the attention at the most for not more than two minutes. Scattered or tired attention. I must literally jab. Short sentences, short paragraphs. Few adjectives and always the same ones when I mention a character already mentioned, so that I can save my regular reader's time. And I must write very carefully with extra clearness. This rubberstamping must be neatly done. Nobody has issued such orders to me but myself and I may be wrong, all wrong! But if I could visualize my magazine reader or book reader as clearly, I dare say it would be a very good thing for me as a writer. Only, I forget the reader entirely when I'm working on the thing that really interests me.
Atreus von Schrader: When I write I do not have my readers in mind. But I have considered them carefully beforehand ... also the editor to whom I hope to sell the piece.
T. Von Ziekursch: When I write the reader is an outsider and never has a chance. It is one of my biggest hopes to bring some fun and joy, some touches of life, some deeper thoughts to any who may read my stories; but I certainly never have and probably never shall give these possible readers a thought. I would write if I never sold a word of it. I wanted to for years when I never had an outside opportunity to get within gunshot of a paper and pencil; I could pour out a lot of those yearnings right here, but what's the use? Now I am in a place where I can write, I am fairly young and, believe me, I'm going to it with both spurs working hard. My mind is unequivocally centered on what I want to write. I hope to find markets for it and readers who'll like it, but I'd write it just the same if I didn't.
Henry Kitchell Webster: This question is answered, better than I can answer it here, in my contribution to The New Republic Symposium on the Novel, entitled, "A Brace of Definitions and a Short Code."
G. A. Wells: I consider nothing but the story. It is there to be told and I try to tell it to the best of my rather poor ability. The reader for me does not exist. It doesn't make any difference whether anybody reads it, other than a continual complaint of unworthiness of my stories would soon put me persona non grata with publishers.