Am I the Audience?

by Mike Cooper

Once we have passably answered the question of why we write (or at least have stopped losing sleep over it), we run smack into the next question: Who am I writing for?

If you already have an answer to that, I encourage you to stop reading this right now and go on with your happy life. Bake a cake. Plant some flowers. Read a book. Go and write to whomever your audience may be.

If you’re still here, you’ve probably—like me—been wrestling with this question for a long while. You may have started out—like me—writing for your parents, or a sibling, or a friend. Maybe you still do. When we learn to write in school, we write for our teacher (Mrs. Frazier). Then come love letters to a significant other (Mary Beth Hagedorn). Maybe a letter to the editor (Fix the damn pothole on 3rd Street!). Some people write to themselves, some to an imaginary being.

I believe that all writing is good writing (like violin practice), so even if we fill journal after journal with our thoughts and observations and then stuff them in a trunk in the attic (or burn them in the back yard) never to be seen by another living soul, I think it’s still beneficial.

To “publish” means (according to Merriam Webster) “to make generally known; to disseminate to the public; to produce or release for distribution.” So, if we’re going to “disseminate to the public,” who the hell is “the public?” Is it the nameless, faceless crowd in the dark theater? Is it “Everyman?” Is it a jury of your peers? Is it anyone willing to listen?

Some people say that you must write, first and foremost, for yourself. But does that mean that you are writing to yourself? Some people say to write to one (external) person, whether real or made up. Some people say to write to an actual “audience”—perhaps a fan base or like-minded individuals. John Steinbeck shared this little bit of wisdom:

“Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death, and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. 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.”

Mary Karr keeps a bell jar on her desk filled with a collection of small, surreal skulls. She says this is who she writes for (along with an assortment of pictures of famous authors she has on her writing room walls).

I usually write for my wife, Irene, because she is the person I most want to impress in the world and whose feedback is most important to me. But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I write to a complete stranger, or a younger version of me, or someone else completely.

I think that no matter who you write for, you should consider how your writing will be of benefit to them—how your questions can help them to see the world a different way. Don’t tell them something they already know.

And, in order to overcome “Editor’s Block,” the two most important things for me are:

1) To write to someone who encourages and loves you.

2) Not to attempt to write to everyone.

So maybe put a little mirror on your writing desk, or a picture of a loved one, or a famous author that you respect, or a stuffed animal. And consider these words from Margaret Atwood:

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Coin of the Realm: the cost of the creative writing life

by Ellen Santasiero

Photo by Shaojie on Unsplash

In Montreal recently for a writing retreat, I paid for a latte at the Café Olimpico by tapping my VISA on a card reader. The window seats at the Olimpico were deep and inviting due to the café’s thick sandstone walls, but I was there to work, so I settled at a small marble-topped table in the back. I got out my notebook, sipped my coffee, and continued work on a short story draft I’d started a few months before.

I never did use Canadian currency, or even exchange for it, while I was there, as it was tap tap tap everywhere I went. I could pay later, and so I did.

Not so in the land of creative writing.

There is no kicking the cost down the road to remit next month, or year. It’s a cash economy there, and too, you must pay up front. With your time, your attention, and your energy.

But even when we have an abundance of those coins, we aren’t always able to pay.

In 1995 when I was a beginning creative writer, I worked a nine-to-five as a graphic designer. After a few years, I asked my boss if I could reduce my hours so I could have Fridays off. I wanted to use that day to write. My boyfriend was OK with my using the spare bedroom in the house we shared, and so I set up a desk and chair in there for myself. Did I go in there and write?

Reader, I did not. Even though I had taken a pay cut, I did not use my Fridays to write.

What held me back?

I read poet Kathleen Norris’s book about acedia, the mental or spiritual torpor that plagued monks and mystics committed to the disciplined contemplative life, but their lot didn’t resonate with me. People suffering from acedia simply do not care. I did care. I deeply yearned to write. For me, the obstacle was resistance, described in rather spartan register by Steven Pressfield in The War of Art.

“Resistance seems to come from outside ourselves,” wrote Pressfield. “We locate it in spouses, jobs, bosses, kids. ‘Peripheral opponents,’ as Pat Riley used to say when he coached the Los Angeles Lakers. Resistance is not a peripheral opponent. Resistance arises from within. It is self-generated and self-perpetuated. Resistance is the enemy within.”

The book helped me. There was something in knowing that I just had the ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill resistance that every other human being possesses.

But other things helped me show up regularly to my creative writing practice, too.

I recently led a workshop called “Tying the Knot: Committing to Your Writing Life” during which I revealed to seventeen eager-but-beleaguered souls that:

1. I set a timer for ten minutes and tell myself that all I have to do is write for ten minutes. I can do most anything for ten minutes! When the timer goes off, I’m always in, and I stay in.

2. I have three writers’ groups, two for critique, and one for submitting work. These groups not only give me constructive feedback and moral support, but they keep me accountable by holding me to my deadlines.

3. Finally, I regularly read at open mics or arrange to be a featured reader. There is nothing like the fear of humiliation to motivate oneself.

Writing is hard. It’s damned hard. But we’re not alone. We talk about that all the time at The Forge, and we’re continually inspired by the effect of The Forge’s creative writing community on the Smithys—they up their commitment to their writing lives each month.

I got a lot done on that short story in the café, and in other French colonial style restaurants and cafés in Montreal, and now my draft is off, on time, to an editor for her feedback. To achieve that goal, I paid up front—ka-ching!—with time, attention, and energy.

I must say, it helps to write in a beautiful old city, too.

The Writing Life: A Matter of Perspective

by Irene Cooper

I went searching for a recent tweet by a writer I admire, and couldn’t find it. Fittingly, the tweet mused on the suggestion that everyone has been writing the same human dramedies—the same histories of trauma and triumph—for eons, each from a slightly different perspective. As with many tweets, it can be read (at the very least) in two ways: that there is nothing new under the sun, and we (especially we who fancy ourselves creative) only replicate rather than innovate; conversely, that we are indeed snowflakes, made up of the same stuff but in awesome, infinite arrangement. Additional possibilities abound, of course. Some are cheerier than others.

I say fitting, too—that I couldn’t locate the thought in the 24/7 textual Indie 500 that is Twitter—because Michael and I will this week head to the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) to rub patched elbows with twelve thousand of our fellow writers. Twelve thousand people will sit on and in front of panels that will discuss writing concerns including voice, genre, education, and the ever-shifting landscape of the publishing industry. As both writers and instructors of The Forge, a creative writing program, we have a good deal of skin in the game. This year our Superbowl is in Seattle, a virtual home field.

Once upon a time I had a conversation with a judge in Reno, Nevada, a place where you might as well tell the truth. It was a friendly chat, nothing law-bound, in which I’d said there was a time I thought I’d be a public defense attorney in NYC. He said public defense was a hard row to hoe. He himself had run a notoriously successful firm with scandalously wealthy clients. He suggested I go back to school. “There is always room at the top,” he said.

I recognized the quote—purportedly a response from Daniel Webster when he was cautioned against becoming a lawyer—he was advised (by people who meant well, we shall presume), that the field, in the early nineteenth century, was saturated. The idea of a “top,” even to the synapses in my young-twenties brain, even in 1986—the year before Wall Street glamorized rather than vilified abject greed—felt wonky. Wonky, but prevailing, like a March wind whipping the Nebraska plains.

It would be another three decades or so before dancer, choreographer, educator, and visionary Liz Lerman would give me language for my ambivalence regarding “top” (and the implied “bottom”). Lerman founded and developed Critical Response Process, a dialogic alternative to creative workshop models that traditionally silence the artist. She also wrote a collection of essays called, Hiking the Horizontal, which her website says, “offers readers a gentle manifesto to bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world.” Neither a top, nor a bottom, then, but a horizon of indiscernible end. Of boundless access and possibility.

AWP is a curious event: Twelve thousand introverts crushed together under one roof, twelve thousand hearts pounding with ambition, twelve thousand and more perspectives on a single moment. No recollection or interpretation will be the same as another.

This AWP, I think I’ll leave the sky to the stars, is what I’m getting at. I want to listen to some stories, marvel at the poets, and stare across Elliott Bay, through the inevitable mist, to the infinite horizon, where I know there is room for me and my work.