This is a rant that happened because it rained and I didn't go outside at all yesterday. It has nothing to do with music whatsoever. Sorry.
Who are we writing for?
When I’m not working on this blog, there is something else I do. I am a writer, as Colin Meloy put it, a writer of fiction. I write short stories.
But earlier today, standing in my bathroom and attempting to flatten my bangs, wondering whether I look more like a high school English teacher or a high school student, it suddenly struck me: there is no audience for the work I do. Who am I writing for, really?
Well, let’s start with a simpler question -- who am I? I’m a college graduate in
Everyone who’s ever become successful as a writer has probably, at some point in their career, said “write what you know.” But what I know is generally rather dull, and what I like isn’t necessarily much of what I know. So let’s look at what I know second-hand: what I read, when I read. Well, I like literature, but I also at times enjoy smut.
Herein lies the problem. Entertaining as it might be, I can’t write smut -- not, at least, without dragging it out into pages and pages during the course of which nothing happens, or, worse, making it into literature. But even if I could write smut, I wouldn’t do it -- I’d never want to see my name attached to anything that could even fleetingly be considered appropriate for ensconcement in a hot pink cover.
As for literature -- I can write it, to a degree, at least. (I like to think so, at least.) But when we read literature, largely the books we read are classics, those with famous names or authors ancient or long dead. (The last book I finished was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which has both.) Unless I’m David Mitchell or Haruki Murakami -- which I clearly am not -- it’s kind of… out of luck.
There is only so much room on the bookstore shelf, and it’s a lot easier to break into the market by writing a two hundred page teenage fluff novel about a girl who finds out she’s a princess or a (considerably longer series about a) boy who finds out he’s a wizard (nothing against JK Rowling; however, readers have suggested that my version of the seventh year is better than hers) than by sending out stories with titles like Spring Summer Fall or The Boy with the Green Sweater to little lit mags whose circulations become even further from little and closer to zero every year. The mass market wants mass appeal, and the vast majority of the time, modern literature hasn’t got that.
But even if I -- or, for that matter, anyone else -- was to write something and have it published, who would read it? Once again, I’m lucky to live in
I should have trouble getting books out of the library. Annoying as it is, it’s also reassuring when I’m not able to find any of the items on my list because they’re all checked out. But this hardly ever happens. And going through library catalogs, it’s quite common to see a larger number of copies of some new sensation than of a book we should all be reading, like, I don’t know, Aleksandar Hemon’s Nowhere Man (of which the Multnomah County Library system has only two copies). But there’s no audience.
That’s the trouble. There’s not an audience. Even I am guilty of it -- drifting toward the young adult section when I should be filling out hold forms for Atwood and Nabokov.
Who are we writing for? There aren’t many people who want to read slice-of-life vignettes where nothing really happens, no matter how skillful the prose might be. Sex sells. Sensation sells. The stories I write don’t contain much of those elements -- or at least they don’t contain much of those elements, not in the right combinations.
Whenever I try to write things that other people would like to read, I wind up growing bored, or disgusted, or some other negative emotion, and abandoning the manuscripts. But when I try to write the stories that I want to write, the stories that glow inside me and make me breathe, I become discouraged, knowing that although I’ve finally set the safe-kept little darlings (“kill your darlings,” said William Faulkner, talking about revising) on paper, no one will ever read much further than, perhaps, if I’m lucky, the first paragraph -- and I abandon them all the same.
My computer hard drive, as well as my own mind and countless notebooks floating around my apartment and my parents’ house, are filled with disembodied paragraphs, sentences, phrases even -- all waiting for the time when I work myself up to put them together. It’s not courage I need; it’s not inspiration or even motivation. I think it’s just a bit of a decrease in the feeling of utter hopelessness, the idea that maybe, somebody…
I don’t know. Occasionally I tell myself I’m going to write a popular young adult smut novel, to get myself a start, a name to go on, to engender some sort of financial stability. I’d use a pseudonym, perhaps. It wouldn’t be anything like the stories I normally write. It wouldn’t even be anything like any story I particularly wanted to write. I would just do it to finance my other, more legitimate activity. Like the kid who sells drugs to pay for college, only less illegal. Completely legal, in fact, but morally wrong. And, for me, morally impossible. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t. That’s where the audience (what little audience for books remains) is -- but it’s not the audience I want.
I want the audience who went to college and took the classes they wanted, even though they knew sociology was useless. I want the audience who has more books than DVDs on their shelves. I want the audience who reads four books at once, except for all the books they finish in one sitting. I want the audience who buys a book and reads it (or maybe, like me, reads it, then buys it, then reads it again), then gives it to a friend, and the friend reads it, then gives it to another friend and that friend reads it, too. I want the audience who trades books like hugs. Or I want the audience who hoards the books they love, whether it’s multiple copies, special editions, or just general accumulation. I want the audience who isn’t pompous about what they’ve read, who has gaping holes in their reading history and feels bad about it, the audience who always has one more book to read -- not because they should but because they want to. I want the audience who wants to…
Who am I writing for? Every good story I write is targeted toward one specific person -- maybe, in a few rare cases, two or three. It doesn’t matter if they’ll ever read it. But if I write for just that one person, I write it so they’ll want it. Maybe no one else in the world will, but that one person will want it.
It’s not a very good way to achieve mass appeal. It’s kind of like this blog -- if I wrote about music other than just that which particularly interests me, maybe more people would read it. If I wrote things that were designed to appeal to more than one person, maybe I would be more motivated to share them. But the difference between one and the number of people who might actually read whatever it is is so small that… no, it isn’t really worth it.
A year ago I wrote an essay for class called Every Book is a Coffee Table Book. Largely, this is true. But a coffee table book (unless, perhaps, it was a gift and has sentimental value) doesn’t really mean anything. If I write something, I want it to be honest, to be meaningful -- not something that can be compared to novelty socks (to which I compared contemporary fiction in the essay). There’s nothing wrong with novelty socks. I even have a pair, and I like them enough that I took them with me to
So, who am I writing for? I don’t know. Is there an audience? I don’t know. But somewhere out there, somewhere in the world, there is a person who every opening paragraph rings true for. Somewhere is the person who wants to read the rest of the story that begins like this:
Last week Sammy informed me that I was going to lose my biking muscles if I did not stop walking so much. “Walking and riding a bike exercise completely different parts of your leg,” Sammy said. You would think that the two activities are compatible, but they are not.
This person probably isn’t you. It probably isn’t anyone you -- or even I -- know. Don’t feel bad. But next time you’re reading something and feel tempted to put it down, just -- try and keep reading.
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