Hi Richard,
I like that idea of adolescent writing being about finding a (one's first)
voice that can be heard. I had not thought that about myself, but now think
it is quite likely true. I will keep that in mind when working with
teenagers and creative writing this year.
Sue
At 01:38 AM 2/20/2005, you 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
|