Writing for You

One of my favourite students, a psychotherapist, recently taught me that in order for us to control our own minds we had to think about our anxiety. We aren’t required to process or analyze our anxiety, although this may be helpful, but simply to acknowledge that it exists. If we don’t do this we revert back to infantile behaviour, which provides us with a temporary distraction from feelings that confuse and hurt us. This behaviour can be manifested in anything from hard drug use to obsessive hand washing; from running naked through the streets to biting our nails.

I suspect that writing, like nail biting and cigar smoking, is a way of avoiding anxiety, a form of escape into another world where things are exactly as we want them to be and where we feel, momentarily, a sense that all is well in the world. What stage of infancy writing might be connected to is anyone’s guess, but I would imagine that there is a ‘fantasy stage’ that all children pass through, probably the age when imaginary friends appear, or perhaps even a ‘lying stage’. I distinctly remember my little brother stealing a plastic trumpet from a shop and then standing in front of my mother with the trumpet behind his back, saying “I don´t have a trumpet behind my back.” He may have been in the ‘lying stage,’ if there is such a thing, and if we can even call something so cute a lie.

Writing may be a way to avoid anxiety, but it is a healthy way to do so. In fact, some might argue that writing has nothing to do with avoiding anxiety at all and is in fact the complete opposite: a way to confront our inner demons head on (especially for those writers dealing with raw emotional content taken from lived experience). However, taking into account the psychological state of many writers – the suicidal tendencies and drug and alcohol abuse, the obsessive-compulsive disorder and strange public displays of madness – I’m not completely willing to buy this argument. Writing, for many, is solace, peace, a moment of calm in the very dramatic and often quite awful storm that we call life. It is also a healthy pursuit in that it does not harm the writer (although perhaps the writer’s loved ones suffer when they cannot get close to the writer because he or she is too wrapped up in the world of story making?) and often leads to feelings of great happiness, and it’s certainly not akin to the kind of anxiety-avoiding behaviour that leads us to go on two week benders or to violently lash out at our loved ones, but it is nonetheless, for me, a nail-biting kind of activity – soothing, distracting and quite pleasant (if you are a nail-biter, which I am not and actually find the habit quite odd).

Psychoanalysts say that we are each and every one of the characters in our dreams. I buy this. I would extend this idea to say that we are also each and every one of the characters that we write about. For this reason, whether we are writing things that can be directly related to us or things that have absolutely nothing to do with us we are still always writing from our own experience – whether lived, learned, witnessed, imagined or even dreamed. This experience always somehow relates back to us, and more often than not, in a very obvious way.

Over the last week I have been trying to understand, then, how as writers we write from our own experience in order to alleviate or avoid our own anxiety and at the same time maintain a relationship with an audience that is external, distant, usually made up of complete strangers. Where does our audience fit? What part do they play? How much do they matter and how do we communicate with them through our writing?

A few days ago I was reading the “rules” for a poetry competition and was struck by how feisty and demanding an audience can be when it wants to. In this particular case, the audience was one person, the editor of Magma. He wrote:

too much contemporary poetry is self-indulgent – concentrating on self-expression to the point where it forgets it has an audience. I feel strongly that, even if our subject matter is deeply personal, we should always be aware we have responsibilities to our reader – to give them everything they need to understand the poem; to entertain; to tell them something new. Great storytellers know how to keep us engaged, leaving space for the reader to make their own interpretations… (my emphasis)

It’s the word ‘responsibilities’ that gets me. I’m not sure I like this idea and not because I don’t respect my readers, but simply because I don’t know who my readers are. How do I know what it is that they ‘need to understand’ my writing? Or what it is exactly that they find ‘entertaining’ or ‘engaging’? I can make guesses, but such guesses will always come back to my own experience and what I find entertaining and engaging. What makes me laugh I think will make others laugh, but I’ll be wrong most of the time with such an assumption because, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, there is not one sense of humour in the world but many. For this reason, I cannot possibly do anything more than write something that I personally would like to read.

In terms of writing something that is clear, I don’t particularly see anything wrong with intuiting the sense of a line of poetry (maybe this is less possible with fiction) rather than pretending that I know exactly what it means. In fact, I like it when poetry has little pockets that aren’t open to me, that however much I try I’m not sure that I fully understand. I don’t like inconsistencies. Nor do I like it when poems use too many big words that tell us nothing. But I do like to just feel the words, the rhythms, the music of their arrangement, without having to know exactly what the writer means by them. Perhaps that’s the ‘space’ that the Magma editor likes, where the reader can make his or her ‘own interpretations’. Yes, I like that, but any notion of trying to please an audience goes counter to what a writer is already in the process of doing – pleasing him or herself.

Something else I read that I found intriguing was an interview with Kate Clanchy, the author of a book of poems about the experience of motherhood that I’ve yet to read entitled Newborn. As I haven’t read Clanchy’s work I cannot comment on it, but what I am interested in is what a reviewer at The Independent said about Newborn. Clanchy responds to the reviewer in the following way:

she said the book was ‘reactionary’ – quite a harsh word, really – because it didn’t give enough ‘choice’ to women without children. But I’m not here to give ‘choice’ to anyone – I’m just a writer, trying to be true to my own experience. I’m not trying to say that all women feel this, or all women should do this.

Absolutely. I can’t understand it when anyone expects a writer to write something that somehow manages to encompass all human experience. It’s a bit much to ask for and whatever such ambition would produce would be something not worth reading. Perhaps the reviewer at The Independent is giving too much power to the writer. As Clanchy rightly says, she’s in no position to ‘give ‘choice’ to anyone.’ She’s just telling things how they are for her and that, as far as I’m concerned, is the best she can do.

The last thing I read that got me thinking about the relationship between the writer and his or her audience was an article by Stanley Fish entitled “Why Do Writers Write?” In it he recalls a radio interview with Colm Toibin, an Irish novelist and short story writer who had written a book about mothers and sons that had had an emotional impact on many of his readers who were calling in to a radio station to express their gratitude and make a connection with the writer who’d given them insight into their own personal stories. Fish was irritated by the way Toibin was keeping an emotional distance from his readers, so much so that the radio host had to take on the responsibility of consoling the callers. However, his attitude changed when he realized that Toibin was more interested in the ‘craft’ of writing than in the ‘emotions it may have appropriated along the way.’ Fish drew from Toibin’s argument that ‘if a reader feels consoled or comforted, that’s all to the good, but it’s not what writing is about’:

Toibin was saying, I write because making things out of words is what I feel compelled to do. Of course the words refer to events in the real world, including events I may have witnessed or experienced, but to locate the value of the writing either in its effects or in the verisimilitude it achieves is to grab at the wrong end of the stick.

Even though, in trying to find meaning to my own writing, I have often found myself saying things like ‘I hope that what I write will help to make someone who has had a similar experience feel a little less alone,’ I am always aware that that ‘someone’ is not in my mind while I am writing and has nothing to do with my drive to write. In fact, the pleasure of writing is, as Fish learns from Toibin, where its value is located. Fish goes on to say:

If you have found something you really like to do – say write beautiful sentences – not because of the possible benefits to the world of doing it, but because doing it brings you the satisfaction and sense of completeness nothing else can, then do it at the highest level of performance you are capable of, and leave the world and its problems to others.

If you’re not able to know who your readers are going to be, you’re certainly not able to know what will make the feel good or bad, or what will make them laugh or cry, so it’s best not to assume that you have any control over anyone but yourself and focus instead on you and what you do best – beautiful sentences. Leave the audience to their own devices and stay wholly focused on crafting your craft.

Going back to the psychological anxiety that we’re all either ignoring or dealing with, depending on the type of day we’re having and the strength we’re able to muster, it’s fair to say that because our anxiety is our own, and nobody else’s, we are first and foremost thinking of ourselves, after which we can regard any peace or comfort that we bring to our audience as a happy and quite probable accident.

Therefore, when a reader, most likely a reviewer, comes along and tells us to be more responsible to our readers, it leaves us with quite a large problem. If we are thinking about or trying to avoid our own personal anxiety, I’d guess that we’d have enough on our plates already to find the time to contend with other people’s anxiety. So, we can do either of the two following things, but not both:

1) Worry about the reader’s (perhaps wrongly) predicted feelings and needs.
2) Be true to our own feelings and experiences.

This is perhaps true of life as well, and is why some people are known as ‘givers’ and others as ‘takers’. I’m slightly ashamed to say it, but as a writer I think I fall into the ‘taker’ category. A writer has to be a ‘taker’ to some degree because to write, unless you are a hermit, is to ignore other people for large stretches of time while you’re caught up in our own thoughts, pecking away frantically at a keyboard. It’s a selfish act. However, I accept this (although I’m not a parent and am sure that between a crying baby and an almost written story, I’d attend to the crying baby) and do my best not to piss too many people off with my selfishness by remembering that without a social life, a love life and a family life I’d have nothing to write about. Luckily for my loved ones, I’m not a science fiction writer.

Yes, I happily take the ‘taker’ position, because taking the ‘giver’ position as a writer is a terrible trap to fall into, one that tries to lure me in from time to time, but that I do my best to steer clear from. To be a ‘giver’ is to fall prey to the ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’, the ‘rules’ and ‘demands’ of an (often imaginary) audience.

The Da Vinci Code is a perfect example of a book that gives. And gives and gives and gives some more. When I read this book, although it temporarily took me far away from the task of having to think about my anxiety, I had no sense that Dan Brown was addressing anything from his own lived experience or dealing with any of his own anxiety. The only anxiety present seemed to be connected to publishing and marketing, and for this reason his book will never be able to help me, the reader, to alleviate, think about or process any of my own psychological anxiety. If the writer isn’t doing any work, neither am I. If the writer cannot look at his anxiety, but prefers instead to disconnect from it, then I’ll do the same. This is, for me, the difference between good writing and not so good writing. When readers, whoever they happen to be, become the driving force behind the writer – I want to help my reader to feel good about herself, I want to bring excitement to my reader, I don’t want to write over my reader’s head, I’d better be careful to entertain the reader or he or she won’t finish my book and tell friends to read it – then the writer is lost. Insecure and lost. Fearful and eager to please. The writer has entered that lying stage of infancy where it is best to tell people what you think they want to hear regardless of whether or not it is true.

The reason that trashy bestsellers exist is because people, in an effort not to think about their anxiety, prefer to escape into fantasy worlds where all that is required of them is to turn the pages of the book and let the words wash over them gently. There is nothing wrong with this. We all need to escape from time to time. I tend to rely on ‘Hollywood crap’ to escape from my anxiety. It works. I curl up on the sofa will a bowl of popcorn and let my mind hover and hum a white noise of nothingness. It’s something I will probably always do, unless I get better at learning to think about my anxiety and turn into a more stable psychological being. To be honest, though, I like the escape from reality. It’s a pleasure not to think.

Yet, although this escape is pleasurable and sometimes completely necessary, I find it difficult to value anything that is created solely for the purpose of pleasing an audience that is made up of people we have never met and probably never will. It’s like trying to please a brick wall. It seems futile and just plain weird. Any art that is created simply to please or to sell or to entertain is not coming from the inside, but rather being dictated from the outside. And when writers start to listen to the voices from the outside, the shoulds and the shouldn’ts, the be less this and be more that, the thanks for writing your book for me because it changed my life and made me a better person, they miss the point. Whether writing is a way for the writer to avoid or face his or her anxiety, if the writer speaks directly to the reader’s own experience then the reader, in simply reading the book, will most likely have to think about his or her own anxiety. A good thing, but not the reason we write.

Write what you love. Write because you love it. And you will find that others will love it too.