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
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