Craft Notes
What We Are Owed
Someone named Dave Pollard made this.
Thoughts on the question: Does a writer owe anything to their readers?
1. A blind item: A writer I think is really talented and original capable of making amazing things severely disappoints me with his current work. I want him to go back to the stuff he wrote near(ish) the beginning of his career. I usually read any of the new work, hoping for the old work to have come back, somehow.
1 a. This new writer-I-don’t-like-so-much came along and ate the writer-I-liked-a-lot. He swallowed him whole. It’s over. Sometimes I tell myself, “go read something else or write something better.”
1 c. I think about a good friend’s adorably woeful expression after she completed Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs. “Don’t even think about reading it. Don’t put yourself through what I did,” she said. This friend loved every other word Lorrie Moore had ever written. A “bad” novel feels, somehow, like a personal insult.
2. Some writers say that the minute you think of your audience you’ve stopped writing.
3. A few readers acted as if Ben Marcus had personally come to their home and punched them in the face when he published a story in The New Yorker that didn’t look much like their favorite Ben Marcus stories.
4 a. Other writers think you must consider the reader, that you owe those eyes something.
4 b. So there is a distinction between the “reader” and the “audience,” and the message would be, don’t consider the audience, but do consider the reader? Are we asking writers, then, to be in a more personal relationship with a faceless reader rather than be aware of what an audience, on average, might be expecting?
4 c. How does one make a bridge to those eyes moving across the page, the unspeaking mouth, the concentrated mind?
4 d. And can one consider the reader too much?
5 a. I once was at an author’s reading and there were questions at the end and a woman who had been sitting in the front row and staring hard at the author (I assumed it was some encouraging friend) asked a question that turned into a profuse and unyielding compliment that then turned to a love song that turned into an extended awkward moment while the woman asked the author, “How do you cope with it– telling stories so personal and touching people so directly?” Someone said she had a prozac quiver in her voice and I thought she was going to explode with tears.
5 b. The author just said he doesn’t, that it wasn’t his problem. He puts it out there and you turn it into whatever you want.
a creator doesn’t owe anything to a reader/listener/viewer/whatever. is it disappointing when a creator you appreciate makes something (and then continues to make things) that you don’t like? sure, it sucks. just gotta get over it, though. people exist in different mental spaces from book to book or album to album or dance to dance.
probability dictates that everyone’s gonna start putting out stinkers after a while. I can’t think of anyone exempt from that.
For me, it’s fundamentally about clarity in the execution of whatever we’re trying to pull off. That’s what we owe the reader (i.e., those willing and able to come along for the ride) — and the work.
SLEEP WITH YOUR AUDIENCE
Worst pick-up line ever.
unless a person specifically commissions an artist or writer to make something for them, with the commissioner’s own criteria in mind, then the artist or whatever shouldn’t feel that they owe anything to anyone.
i owe money to my girlfriend but she won’t let me make it up to her in poems.
People who don’t get published are much more likely to think writers owe them something than people who do.
I highly doubt Zak Smith would say something so repulsively retarded.
Doesn’t take much to get anonymous blue silhouttes riled up these days does it?
“3. A few readers acted as if Ben Marcus had personally come to their home and punched them in the face when he published a story in The New Yorker that didn’t look much like their favorite Ben Marcus stories.”
I’m not sure I agree with this. I think people were upset with Marcus because he helped started that silly, ridiculous Traditional vs. Experimental binary and then proceeded to write the same kinds of stories he pejoratively labeled “traditional.” The binary itself is dumb, lazy, and ahistorical and he exposed himself as nothing more than a posturer.
They’re gray on my screen, I think–though it’s a blueish gray (which is why I say “gray” and not ‘grey’, ay being a blue-er way to write the long-‘a’ sound than ey). –now I’m thinking ‘as much blue as gray’, like a border state.
I don’t know what was either a) offensive, or b) stupid, about your comment (though I suspect it might have been a joke on the theme of ‘contracts between artists and audiences’), and I feel owed an explanation.
Baffling–but I grew.
I say, Only think about the audience and never the reader, and make sure the audience is ONLY IN YOUR HEAD.
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[…] Catherine Lacey, at html giant, considers whether writers owe their readers anything. A few readers acted as if Ben Marcus had personally come to their home and punched them in the face when he published a story in The New Yorker that didn’t look much like their favorite Ben Marcus stories. […]