Or perhaps that should actually be "For Whom Do You Write..." my choice of title might change depending on my intended audience!
I've been thinking about this question a good bit lately, without even realizing at first that I was thinking about it. I'm in one of those seasons where I find creativity sneaking up on me when I least expect it: I keep stumbling onto stories that want to be written, and (thankfully!) am locating the time to sit down and actually do some of the writing. Not a whole lot yet, but some.
But as always, creative seasons surprise me. I have a lot of stories in the mental garage that I've been ready to pull out and work on for ages, including some already written that I long to rework. Instead, I find myself writing some things I didn't expect, stories that are "calling out to me" at this particular moment.
One story I began working on last night is a real surprise: it's a story (for children, I think?) about a cheetah. The sweet girl and I have been studying mammals during the first eight weeks of school, and during our "feline" studies, I found myself absolutely fascinated by cheetahs. The bare outline of an African legend was mentioned in one of the books we were reading: it intersected in my head with some of the fascinating facts we were reading and then intersected again with Kipling, and suddenly I found myself starting a story. I love the mysterious ways stories come to us; it's really impossible to track the full path they travel!
But I am curious to know about others' approaches to story-writing. For me, my respect for the mysterious process of how a story-idea (or perhaps it would be better to call it a story-seed) gets born (or blows into my consciousness like a milkweed seed) means that I find myself thinking less about any intended hearers when I first sit down to write. I think I am so busy listening myself to what this particular story is trying to say that I'm not yet thinking too far ahead about who else might ever hear it. My consciousness of crafting it for other people does hover somewhere pretty close by: often I think about how certain lines would sound when read aloud, and sometimes the very way a story starts to come to me gives me an indication of who the audience might be. Hence my deep feeling as I began to write last night that the story I was writing was quite probably one "for children" (which isn't to say that adults might not enjoy it too).
I've heard a number of authors say, in various ways, that they primarily write "for themselves." If the story doesn't please them, keep them interested, or make sense to them -- how will it do any of those things for someone else? I think that makes more intuitive sense to me than the kinds of writing advice you sometimes see that you ask you to picture a very specific audience: say, seven year old girls or ten year old boys. I am shaped by more specific thoughts of audience when I set out to revise, but in the opening draft, I am primarily just trying to listen well and get down, as truly as I can, what I'm hearing and imagining.
Maybe the more true answer is that I write stories because I love stories, and I write stories in the hopes that one day those stories might find their way to other people who love them too. As Madeleine L'Engle used to say, when asked who her stories were for, "they're for people."
All of this is somehow tied up for me in the "where does the meaning of a story reside" question as well. But that's probably a post for another day.
2 comments:
I don't usually think too much about intended audience either, though with fiction anyway, it seems like most of what I write ends up being more oriented toward children. Probably just because I'm such a kid at heart!
Again, me too. :-) And I've thankfully gotten over (long, long ago) any need to "apologize" for writing stories that seem primarily suited for children.
When I was in my early 20's I was invited to participate in a couple of weeks of fiction-writing programs in an MFA program (though I hadn't actually been accepted into the program, and never actually was...long story, but interesting season in my writing life). It never occurred to me that I would encounter intellectual snobbery over the stories I wrote, but boy, I did, on various levels.
At least one of those levels came about on just this issue...I can still recall the sting I felt in the writing workshop where we each took a turn listening to people critique the story we'd submitted to the class. I purposefully submitted a story that I'd loved writing but that I knew needed a lot of work still. Most people gave me helpful feedback, but when it came time for one woman to say something, she more or less sat back, shrugged, and said "I don't really have anything to say about it. It's a children's story." Whoa. Dismissed! Knocked the wind right out of me, especially since, up until that moment, I hadn't stopped to think about the "who it was for" question. It happened to have a child protagonist though.
I also remember with gratitude that the "guest author" in the workshop that day (the guy who was a well-known published novelist, i.e. the one everybody sort of looked to for expert opinion) said some really kind things about my story and pointed me, constructively, to Capote's "A Christmas Memory" -- his example, I think, of a story that dealt with important themes and had a child protagonist. I remember that man with such fondness that I still occasionally buy one of his books when I find them in library sales, even after all these years, though I must confess I don't much like his novels! :-)
Post a Comment