The Reader Is Always In The Room: a reminder for student writers
If “I write only for myself” isn’t the biggest lie told by professional authors, that’s only because it’s tied with “I don’t think about plot.” You just write for yourself? Ah, bullshit. You’re writing to be read, or we wouldn’t know who you were, smarty. You’re just trying to make yourself sound…I don’t know what. Noble? Humble? Superior? (And I say again on this blog, you’re writing to tell a story. Guess what that involves? It starts with a P-L and rhymes with “plot.” Doesn’t matter whether you use the actual word or you don’t.)
But even when we’re aware that someone will be reading our work, we still sometimes play tricks on ourselves that, in my experience, can often cause more problems than they solve, and I think it’s because of that future verb tense: will be. Translation: “Someday, maybe, someone will be reading this.” Those might not be the best conditions for exciting creation.
I used to tell my students, “Don’t worry about your first draft, just get through it and you’ll go back and rewrite it.” But I don’t think I fully believe that anymore, not if someone’s dead serious about writing. (Not everyone is, and I envy those who know the difference.) At some point as a writer, you have to start thinking about the reader. Not as in: “someone’s going to read this someday,” but as in: “someone’s reading this now, and how’s that going?”
Again, this is one of those times when the TV people just have it all over the literature people. In TV they just don’t have the time for the hemming and hawing and the general yearslong bloodletting that can accompany the prosewriting process. That’s not to say TV writers work less — they work really, really hard — but they do a lot of writing, rewrites included, in a compressed span of time.
The other thing that I think happens with TV (and film) writers that doesn’t happen with some literary writers, is they think of the audience from the start. When someone writes a script because it’s their job to do so, there is no “will be” to the process; that thing’s GOING to be read, and I think that sense permeates every word that gets put down. Scripts themselves are written in a very participatory language: there’s a lot of “we see” and “we hear” written into the scene descriptions; even when a “we” pronoun is missing, there’s a conversational aspect to script description that’s very close-third-person:
NATALIE enters. She’s 22, thin, dressed in someone else’s clothes, mostly an older male’s. She carries herself like she already holds the secrets of everyone in the room.
Who’s that talking to? A lot of people. A script is meant to be read by scores of professionals, all of whom are reading it to decipher what their job is going to be.
A script, in other words, is written from the start with a reader present.
Why would you not write fiction that way? Yet, people often do not. I read so much student fiction that is fine, but which is so clearly not being written for anyone, not yet. It’s too vague or it’s ridiculously complicated, but most of all it’s holding back. It’s waiting, I guess, for some final, future draft to realize there’s someone else in the room.
Meanwhile, some writing is like that girl who struts right into the awkward party or the uptight workplace and just changes the chemistry of the scene. Because she knows who she is and who she’s talking to and how all that’s supposed to go. And that girl might be a narcissist or a climber, and she might be transparent and clumsy. But goddamn, you’ll remember her.
Maybe it’s this: we read all our lives, yet when we begin to write we forget nearly everything we’ve ever read, partly because what we’re doing seems so distant from the end result. Your brain has to translate its pictures and sounds and feelings into a code that will then unpack in a reader’s brain and become those same pictures and sounds and feelings. Here’s the trick: aside from anyone you know who ends up reading your published work, you can’t know any of those other brains. They’re somewhere else, even somewhen else. But one of them, a chosen representative, has to be in the room with you now.
This sounds suspiciously like a plea from a teacher for more entertaining early drafts, but I really believe in this idea, because I know what’s going on: some writers are so freaked out by the very idea of trying to tell a story — I have to balance language and event and the timeline and this point of view and and and — that it’s paralyzing. The first thing to go is the idea of being entertaining, and yet that’s why we read in the first place, or at least why we keep reading. But this becomes habit. Once you’ve set aside being entertaining, there are infinite reasons not to pick it up again, to keep telling yourself I’ll get there. And I’m here to tell you: a lot of people just don’t.
Think about a time you’ve seen a parent dealing with his or her difficult children during a public tantrum. That’s the writer and his or her fiction. Most of the time, you’ll see the parent freaking out or shutting down — either all-out yelling or becoming one of those people who hisses, as though that’s really all that quieter. Now think of a time you’ve ever seen a parent deal with the same situation, but they’ve remained cool and calm and handled the whole thing with humor. What does this do? It calms the kids, usually, but it also radiates outward and calms anyone watching. You end up admiring that parent, thinking, “Damn, they’re good.” I’m never that parent, by the way. But they did exactly what needed to be done, and they were actually fun to watch doing it.
That’s what it’s like when a writer remembers the reader is there. And it makes all the difference in the world.
Photo Credit: Mark Ramsay via Compfight cc