I am not like some writers who routinely produce a poem-a-day or those ambitious talents who can come up with an intriguing blog post or chapter of a novel on a daily basis. It is not as if I’m sitting around waiting for that one-line inspiration to fall from the ceiling, as Annie Dillard and, apparently, Thoreau suggested we are given. My inspiration usually tumbles out after a grouping of my own words gets reworked multiple times, or after reading other work I like or intensely dislike, as long as something moves me out of complacency or ennui.
What I do know about my writing is that I want to share it immediately. Almost as soon as a poem forms on the page, I am looking for someone to read it. I need that second opinion, of course, but I also want to be part of the transfer of words and ideas from one to another, exam reactions, and consider what is and isn’t working.
My husband Daniel may be engrossed in the of reading a long historical work such as Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, or a nonfiction critical commentary on politics, such as Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America, The Battle for Our Better Angels, when I interrupt him with barely a thought to the page he is reading. I am entirely selfish about readers.
“Could you listen to this draft of a new poem?” Fortunately for me, Dan always puts his book down and listens. After I go through a few more drafts of a new work, I typically send it to my daughters Colette and Nicole even though they are impossibly busy with demanding careers in the law, rearing their young sons, and crafting costumes for their sons’ musical theater or attending one of their kids’ basketball or baseball games. I interrupt their lives with my entreaty, “Would you read my new poem or post or chapter from my novel in progress?” Invariably, they always say, “yes,” and read it, offering comment.
I also hook my sisters Phyllis and Dianne and sister-in-law Marilyn as early readers of new work. I might bring a copy of a new poem to my lunch date with friends or send it via email. By the time I’m ready to get serious about revisions of work, I share it with my two writers’ groups and take it in their critiques.
Only later do I prepare sending work to publications or to an editor or publisher for consideration. It is a long process from conception to print in some form of my ideas in writing. But I need an audience even if the audience turns out to be a small group of friends. While we may start writing for ourselves, we all want to share the work, too. I don’t like coming across as needy, but the writing life is both isolating and one requiring a shared experience, an exchange of ideas and more, looking for that validity of the work itself. As William Faulkner said in an audio recording of his writing, “if it's not valid, I have wasted a lot of pretty valuable time.” And validity comes in the form of other peoples’ responses.
To writers, there is little more painful than finding what we have worked so long and hard on does not move others in any way. But who is our work intended for? The question becomes critically more important as we move beyond the early readers circle of friends and family.
For whom are we writing? Reviewing Toni Morrison’s work for NBC News online magazine in April 2019, Janell Ross wrote, “It can be easy to overlook the resistance Morrison faced and the courage she exhibited when she decided to write stories about black people, using the language and experiences of black people, without changing those stories for a white audience. Morrison, as both a writer and a senior editor at Random House, never watered down her stories or changed the language or perspective to make them about or more accessible to white readers.” Morrison described the demand that she do so as blatant racism.
Kurt Vonnegut suggested writers write for an audience of one: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
John Steinbeck, in an interview with The Paris Review, recommended a similar idea: “I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one."
While Vonnegut and Steinbeck advised a singular approach to writing, neither expected nor wished an audience of one. That kind of limitation is defeating and deflating. Of course, in today’s crowded market of published works—traditional, hybrid, and self-published, the audience of one is a little too familiar to many writers who struggle to find that larger group of readers.
While the act of writing is a solo flight, the expectation is nearly universally held that someone will read the work. That is the unspoken contract every writer must sign: I will write this work, but I am asking you to read it, not simply as receiver of message but in dynamic interaction with these symbolic representation across a page. This is my lifeblood as a writer and reader of other writers.
While Dan was in the midst of cleaning the coffee maker, I called him in to ask him to read my blog post. My first audience of one, Dan, just approved.
This is exactly what anyone having a writer’s block, experiencing self doubt or fear as a writer should read! Write it for one person.
Ah, as usual, you strike a nerve! I have lost my best readers and so write for the most finicky of them--myself. I am never pleased.