For the last several days, more than a few discussions have popped up on my flist about writers and self-indulgence or, more specifically, writers being accused of being self-indulgent. I also stumbled across some comments on poll asking writers to respond to how they interact with readers, and the comments in this poll touched on some of the same issues. And that, my friends, started the wheels in my mind a-turning.
When I was in grad school, my mentor, our Milton scholar, left for an administrative position at another university, and our new Renaissance guy was fresh out of Harvard. There was no avoiding him if I wanted to keep taking classes in my area, but one thing that I found out about him early on was that his commentary on drafts of papers led to having to refocus the paper on one that he would most enjoy reading. This didn't have anything to do with the strength or scope of the argument, simply on his personal scholarly kinks. I finally stopped reviewing drafts with him and settled for discussion of the issues I was writing about, because I was damned well going to write my paper. He was welcome to go out and write his own.
Does that make me a self-indulgent writer?
I've received feedback on my fiction from writers groups and my own dedicated readers and taken some of what they've said to heart in revisions. My writing is stronger for it. However, there are other things that I've blatantly ignored.
Does that mean that I'm pulling a self-indulgent snit?
Am I somehow on a moral or artistic higher ground if I say that I don't give a flying flaming fuck what my readers think about my writing, because I'm not writing for them, I'm writing for me, and they will like some things I say and not like others. Like it or lump it, dearies.
Writer/reader interaction is a complex thing, and frankly, I think that writers who say that they don't give that flying flaming fuck what their readers think and that the reader doesn't enter into their minds at all when they are writing are liars. However, on the other end of the spectrum, writers who make pandering to their readers their most important concern are simply word-whores.
When I teach, I spend time, a lot of time, on discussing what it means to write for an academic audience, and when my classes analyze other writers' texts, I ask them to consider audience in our discussion. I make them respond to each other's writing so that they can see how what they say and how they say it impacts their readers. And let's be honest here, shall we: All writers write for an audience. All of us. Every last one. The "Oh, I'm just writing this for myself" stance is bullshit. Well, it's a smokescreen really, an illusion that is built to cushion writers from what readers might say about their work. It's a dodge, an escape route. Climbing aboard that last, lonely lifeboat as the Titanic is going down.
Even the most private stuff that I write, things in my personal hardcopy journal that no one besides me will ever see, I'm writing for an audience: me. I know that I will come back and reread what I've written, and I know how I read, how to code things so that they will mean for me later what they do when I record them. My academic writing was for my professors first and then for editors. The writing I do at work is for the people who will be using my documents to better understand and do their jobs. The audience changes, but it is always there.
When I write fiction, like Stephen King, I always have a Constant Reader in mind. To be honest, this person has no gender or substance (though I'll use the generic "he" to refer to him here). He has no long list of traits or preferences that I could rattle off for you, but he is always with me when I write, a presence that is lingering up above the story but not a part of it. Watching. The one quality that he has is that he does not tolerate lies, the lies that would come from pandering to him, from letting lose the reins of character or plot simply to gain his approval, from failing to be as caught up in my own story when I'm writing it as I expect him to be when he reads it.
While he doesn't dictate what to write--the characters do quite enough of that on their own,--I have a sense of how he will feel about what I've written. I know if it will make him uneasy, angry, sad, giddy, aroused.
And I don't think there's a storyteller worth her salt out there who doesn't want her readers to respond to her work. Who doesn't want to see their words and works resonating in her readers? It's not accidental that so many writers have taken to blogging. It brings us closer to our Constant Readers, as we talk about projects and craft, our lives and the things and people we love. Writers mainline words (which is the medium of exchange on the Web), and while the resulting trip might be wildly exhilarating or nightmarish, we're hooked on it.
Am I a self-indulgent writer? Of course. Writing is a ladder of indulgences. I indulge my characters (in good ways and in bad) so that they will, in turn, indulge me by responding to my attention. From that response, stories are born, stories that I write because the act of creating them brings me pleasure. A pleasure that my readers indulge whenever and however they respond to what I've written.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
