Who are you writing for?

Who are you writing for?

Who are you writing for? Art is fundamentally social. It is bound up with showing and reception. Think about that place of exchange that you envision as the arena for this thing you are writing. There are marketplaces, scenes, relationships, posses, subcultures, feeds. And all exchanges are probably some complicated knot of all of the above: there is currency and capital in a scene whether or not dollars come along with it. And there is meaningful emotional relationship in a commercial exchange, however much institution, advertising, and financial transaction might come into it. Even if you are writing for yourself, in a journal, there is some kind of social experience, the address to the self, of the self of the present to the self of the future, or perhaps the contemplative self to the addled self or vice versa.

Imagined audience can be a source of permission, discipline, or useful challenge, but that’s not the focus of this tuning exercise. This exercise is oriented toward the way that envisioning a particular audience can corral or occlude your impulses or sense of possibility. It is about noticing and pruning away the blinders, guidelines, and internalized ventriloquism that seeps into your thinking when writing for an particular audience.

There’s something useful about those blinders, guidelines, and ventriloquisms — they got you to this draft. But perhaps revision is a time to ask whether or not you want to keep them with you as you go further. We so often write or make things “on spec” — an industry term for producing something for a potential buyer with the hope of success, like, say, writing your own episode of serial tv show to demonstrate how good you’d be at it, without compensation or promise that you get hired — hoping for an eventual audience with our audience. In a formula-driven marketplace, this may be a great path to success, granted, especially if you are very excellent at internalizing and replaying those guidelines so that your writing is both familiar and excitingly fresh. But what if the spec was removed from the equation—even just as a thought experiment—if you just considered the question of who this writing is for without the aspirations of its entry into a world it doesn’t yet circulate within? (The same question can be asked if you are writing something that makes a second or further entry to a world that your writing already circulates within. What if you considered this writing apart from that world, as not for that same audience, even momentarily?)

Expectations Ledger

Set a timer for ten minutes — long enough to get beyond your initial respones, maybe get a little bored with the question, and dig a little. Make two columns down the page, and envision the receiving audience in front of whom you have hopes for the success of writing. Envision that audience in full possession of its time-earned expectations for what makes a good or even viable piece of writing. In the left column, record generic expectations that you associate with this audience. In the right column, record examples from your existing draft that perform according to those expectations. 

Remember that even reception communities that understand themselves as contrarian, antimarketplace, experimental, “uncategoriazable,” hybrid-loving, or otherwise anti-norm, are full of expectations, norms, and signals of social belonging. Some of these might be delightful. Some of them might be your intentionally embraced credos. Some of them might just be another code that gets you cred or gives you a place in a group. Some of them might be repeating the inertia of certain earnest kinds of hero worship.

Your questions

When you’re done with your ledger, circle the expectations that your gut tells you have caused yourself to second-guess your writing, led you to limit where your writing could go or led you to push it in a particular direction, or led to a kind of ventriloquism of voice or interest. 

For each circled expectation, pose yourself three questions in a What-if or Do-I-Really form. Then write a written response to the most compelling questions that you just wrote. 

Perhaps, to give yourself extra courage to embrace anything you might have found out about what you really want to do, draw a picture or collage one from found images, of the unknown and unnamed audience or community that can meet you there, along that other pathway — the audience who expects and loves what will happen in your writing if you follow your what-ifs to their logical conclusion.  

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?