Who are we writing for?

Last week, a good discussion almost broke out in my graduate seminar (it would have, if we weren't already deep in another one) when a student used the word "elitist" to describe a novel's frame of reference. The book, he felt, was too insular--the product of intellectual squirreliness, an egghead speaking in code to the ivory tower.

He has a point, and so we're going to throw this topic on the floor in the coming week's class: why are we doing this? And who is it for? I have a ready answer for the second question, which I sent to the students as part of a little epistolary manifesto (manifistle?) which I hope will serve as a jumping-off point for class:

We are writing for other smart people. Now, it may be that the vast majority of these smart people are, in fact, formally educated. But I know from experience that many, many of them aren't. The people I meet on book tours and at university readings continue to surprise me. They are all over the map.

However, the thing is, I don't give a rat's ass. The reason is that I don't consider one "class" of reader to be of greater value than any other. Nor do I value one kind of human experience over another. The suffering of a university dean is no less real than the suffering of a starving child thousands of miles from here. The latter may suffer more, but his suffering is not more legitimate as a human experience. The pleasure of a cold beer on a summer afternoon is not more legitimate than the pleasure of solving a tricky equation. A good writer can communicate all kinds of human experience to all kinds of people--should be able to show an intelligent but uneducated reader what it feels like to solve that equation, to be that dean.

The trouble with thinking about audience is that literary writers are usually wrong about who their audience is. Or, as Rhian put it to me, channeling a mentor of hers, "It's none of our goddam business."

As for the first question, I think I know less now about why I write than I did when I started. Because I can't stop? Because I need it to feel alive? Because I want people to love me? (If all I wanted was to be loved, I could have picked a more lovable genre, I suppose.) The one thing I do know is that it's dangerous to connect the first question to the second. To assume you know who you're writing is for, and to write it for them. Because before you know it you're writing down to them. If you need to feel you have a specific audience, do what one writer once told me to do if I was nervous at a reading: pick somebody at random from the audience and read the whole thing to them. My random audience members are Rhian and Skoog, still today. Will this amuse them? Move them? Occasionally I have written something, shown it to one of the two, then shelved it. And that was enough for me.

Anyway, the questions of purpose and audience always get tangled up in discussions of class and privilege. That's as it should be. A novel, say, can't contain the whole universe: you need to assume your reader knows certain things. And so it is inherently for insiders. With every word you choose, you choose to include or eliminate somebody from the people who will "get it."

Can we know who we're including and who we're not? Not really. But we can go into our work with honesty and openness and do our best to be inclusive without alienating the already initiated. For my part, I try to err on the side of inclusion: when push comes to shove, the initiated can suck it.

But readers, I find, will give you more space than you think. They'll forgive you for explaining too much, or for talking over your head, if you give them a way to feel comfortable and interested. A compelling voice. Moral complexity. Good characters.

As for my seminar, well...this is quite the can of worms. If you don't hear from my students and me after Wednesday, know that we sacrificed ourselves for a good cause.

Photo: our son found that button on the street!

Writing Inside And Outside Experience

There are two mistakes I see a lot of writers--often students--making, and when you get down to it they're the same mistake.

The first is the tendency of the writer who has inside information to hew so closely to that information that they forget the rest of the world. This information could be anything, but these days it often involves culture and class--the increasing diversity of our society has created a great demand for culturally specific material, and such material, in the possession of a skilled writer, gives their work a special authority. Think of Louise Erdrich, for instance, or Jhumpa Lahiri. These are good writers who have used their inside information to breathe life into universally interesting stories.

But sometimes a writer gives the inside information itself too much weight, and it turns into exploitation. Look! it can seem to say. Hyphenated Americans! Alternative Lifestyles! The inside information no longer offers readers a unique point of access to the human condition--instead, it feels like a barrier through which the reader cannot pass.

The other mistake is perhaps a reaction to writers like Lahiri and Erdrich. It's the assumption, among those who don't have any inside information, that their own experience is worthless, and they have to go fake it in somebody else's territory. The result is every bit as sterile as the exploitive-insider story, and perhaps more boring.

The worst thing about this mistake is that the writer is wrong--there IS value in their own experience. They just haven't hunted it down yet. Their inside information is as inside as it gets--it's their own way of seeing. Indeed, that's the true inside information for everyone, no matter what else they know. The trouble is that you don't always know how you see things. Every writer needs to figure this out: you have to trick yourself into not tricking yourself.

Lately I have hugely enjoyed the work of writers who have worked their way through their cultural otherness and emerged as, definitively, themselves. Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead fit the bill, I think--they are black writers whose work addresses race, but is about, and for, humanity. And Frederick Seidel, who I've blogged about a couple of times, is a rich white guy who, against all odds, renders fascinating a kind of life that our literate culture is otherwise liable to dismiss. He does it--as the other writers I've mentioned do--by being absolutely, inalienably, himself.