But this leads back to how much you trust an audience, or what kind of
writing (& its audience) you find yourself exploring. Alison has a very
different audience for her fantasy trilogy than for her poetry,
although in a few cases, me for instance, they overlap. And I suspect
she approaches the concept of audience & what kind of writing she
attempts for each in different ways as she takes up one or the other
(n0ot necessarily consciously).
I couldn't (now) write 'for' a particularly imagined audience, partly
because I can't imagine an audience that way. I can *hope for one, but
that's different, & post hoc I think the term is.
In a sense if you write to find out what it is you have been given to
say (to paraphrase Robert Creeley), then the writing is central, not
the possibe readings. But I suspect we all hope there will be some...
Doug
On 19-Feb-05, at 7:38 AM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
> In response to Tom's "old question" Andrew wrote:
>
>>>> I (really) write for myself - to get my inside self outside, to be
>>>> able
> to see it. (As in 'I see what you mean'.)<<<
>
> I started writing poetry when I was a teenager because it was the only
> way I
> found to prove to myself that I had a voice that could be "heard."
> (There is
> a long autobiographical context to this that I will not go into in
> detail
> here; there are probably others on this list who began writing for
> similar
> reasons: as a way of dealing with external and internal isolation.)
> And I
> wanted everyone to read those poems because I felt that, somehow,
> giving
> such form to my voice made it, or should have made it, impossible to
> ignore.
> Boy was I wrong. When I think about who I write for now, I think the
> answer
> is in many ways the same, though what I have to say now is much less
> rooted
> in the need I had at the time for personal catharsis, which made so
> many of
> the poems I wrote more successful as therapy than as art.
>
> But this question of audience, of whom we write for, is interesting in
> another way, as well. I am teaching an introductory creative writing
> workshop and we are having our first go-round at my students' first
> short
> story assignment. One of the themes that has come up in discussion
> over and
> over again is the nature of a written short story as a public
> document, as a
> document intended to have/for a public--even if it is only a public of
> one
> or, as in the case of my workshop, 16--and how that intention shapes
> what is
> required of the author in the shaping of the story. My students have a
> very
> hard time with the notion that they should not rely on a reader to
> give them
> the benefit of the doubt and assume that he or she will "figure out"
> what
> the author "means" no matter how unclear the writing is in some sense.
> Some
> of this, of course, simply demonstrates that they are new writers who
> have a
> lot to learn, but it also puts a new twist on Tom's question: It's not
> simply a matte of, For whom do you/we/I write? But what does it mean to
> write for an audience, any audience, in the first place?
>
> Richard
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Reserved books. Reserved land. Reserved flight.
And still property is theft.
Phyllis Webb
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