Education Quote by Tony Hillerman

Hillerman’s line is a quiet slap to two temptations writers rarely admit they have: performing for approval and talking down to strangers. By insisting you write for “two people,” he makes the act intimate, almost private. The first reader is yourself, the only one you can actually locate and interrogate while drafting. The second is an audience that exists mostly as an imagined presence - and Hillerman refuses to let that imagined crowd become a convenient straw man.

The provocative twist is the clause writers might rather ignore: your audience is “usually better educated and at least as smart.” It’s a corrective to the marketing-era fantasy that mass readership requires simplification, that clarity must mean flattening. Hillerman, a bestselling mystery novelist who built intricate plots around Navajo culture and landscape, knew that popular fiction can be exacting without being exclusionary. The subtext: research, precision, and respect aren’t literary luxuries; they’re the minimum ante if you don’t want your work to feel like it’s winking at the reader for being easy.

There’s also ego management here. The line disciplines the author’s vanity by suggesting the reader is your peer or superior, not your customer. You can’t coast on authority or jargon. You have to earn every paragraph by making it intelligible, honest, and alert. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s anti-condescension - a reminder that the real competition isn’t the audience’s attention span, it’s your own laziness.