all of the instruments of faith and sex and god
I've taken two UCLA Extension classes with Samantha Dunn--personal essay and memoir--and at the beginning of each course, she asked the class to do a 5-minute writing exercise answering the question, "Who do you write for?"
The first time I did the exercise, Sam had just finished telling us that she writes with the enjoyment of her smartest, closest friend in mind--a fellow writer who, although their lives could not be more different, "got" her writing better than anyone else. I said that I wrote for one of my very good (due to some childhood trauma, I feel wildly uncomfortable using the term "best friend") friends. I don't remember what explanation I gave, but I wrote it completely aware that the books this friend and I enjoy reading couldn't be more different--and one of us sometimes can have a pretty strong antipathy for the books the other loves. So if you extrapolate that I'd write the kinds of things I'd want to read, it's almost an O. Henry level of laughable that I'd imagine myself writing anything they'd really like.
The second time I did the exercise I knew I couldn't bring myself to tell the lie about my friend again, but if I didn't write for a friend, or my family, or the ghost of some long-dead poet or scribe, who did I write for? Process of elimination left me with the idea of writing for myself, and that sounded good (and also rang a little true, since I don't really go to any effort to prepare my pieces for publication) and so I wrote that. And Sam was highly pleased with me, like I'd had an epiphanic moment right there. And since I'm Sam Dunn's total little fangirl, I was giddy and pleased with myself and convinced it was the right answer.
Only. . . I felt guilty, too, because I knew that response wasn't really true. I don't write for myself. My goodness, writing for myself is such a chore. I don't think I'd write at all if I was my only audience. I feel light-years of emotional distance from writers who have to write, writers who say they'd drown in their own thoughts if they couldn't at least scribble on a soup can label. Who can lock themselves away and write, and write, and write for hours and feel catharsis at the end.
I am so not that kind of writer. I am not that kind of person. Funny again, because I love being alone with my thoughts. I was an only child, no friends within walking distance but tons of books and even to this day I find myself explaining (but then even only to those I really trust) that being alone, thinking, reading a book, noodling around on the Internet--that's an activity for me. Like mini-golf or going to a bar. I set aside time for it. I plan long stretches of nothing. It takes me a lot longer to get bored than most people.
So I'm already inside my own head a lot, by choice. Thinking about things. Re-thinking. Thinking from a different angle. Thinking about them as another person. Imagining all sorts of real and wildly fantastical scenarios. Should make me a great writer, right? Lots of stuff going on up there to get down on paper!
But. Why? Why do I need to get it down on paper? I've already worked it out in my head. It's there. It's made me happy, or sad, or given me that catharsis or occupied me on a long flight. It's done. I don't need to revisit it; don't need to write it down so I can look at it again. I'll remember. If it was just for me, there's no way even the Secret of Life, the Universe and Everything would go from synapse to text.
Even the Typepad blog, started a few months ago just to get into the habit of writing again, had gone unloved more days than not. It was such a chore, such a hassle to think of something to write, and then write it and then obsessively check my stats counter to see whether anyone had read it that day--and if I did have visitors, why hadn't they commented? And maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a writer, and it's just too bad that my untaught semi-effortlessness with standard English grammar and ability to discourse at length on almost any literary theme (with verbal footnotes and annotations!) was going to waste away because I just didn't like writing.
But it didn't feel right, and I knew that I loved writing emails to my friends, and am quite the one for longwinded messageboard posts, and I'd really been active on Livejournal several years ago, before I stopped, and all that had been unhesitatingly fun. So I decided to give LJ a try one more time, to see if there was some piece I was trying to fit in the wrong way. Before I gave the Bronx cheer to any dream I still had of a creatively fulfilling career and resigned myself to corporate PR, and then death.
And here I am, on a Wednesday night, waiting for my toenail paint to dry and practically itching to post here. "What do I have to say? Do I have anything to write? I just wrote a long thing yesterday; will anyone want to read it? I need to write something!" And it hits me, and I finally have my Helen-Keller-under-the-water-spigot moment worthy of Sam Dunn: I don't write for myself. I don't write for someone else. I write for everyone. Anyone. I am so desperately in need of having an audience, of any demographic, knowing that my words are being read. And with Livejournal, with this format, I know that.
I know for a fact that the dozen (20? 30? I don't know; not checking right now) people who have me on their Friends list will at least see this post sometime tonight or tomorrow. Some of them might even comment, and then I'll know for a fact that they've read it. My site counter will tell me who else stops by after I hit "post," and it'll be some satisfyingly (to me) high number, just through the nature of this site's traffic flow and random Internet traffic. And that will make me actually happy inside. The idea that I might have been a part of someone else's day, that something I wrote made one person reflective, or happy, or even irate--I can't describe why that makes this loner only child so satisfied (though I'm sure the one has a good deal to do with the other, which is why they're next to each other in that sentence), but it does.
I don't write for a friend. I don't write for myself. I don't write for one person at all. I want to write for everyone. I want something I say, even just one paragraph, one thought, one turn of phrase in a larger piece, to have a resonance for anyone who comes across it. I want them to forward it to their friends and say, "look--she's . . . " She's. . .whatever. Whatever it is, that's what I want. When I think of writing, I want to entertain. To capture and inspire. And the limitations or limitlessness of my aim is such that I couldn't feel I'd accomplished that if writing with a single reader in mind.
And that--I cannot tell you how good it feels to know that.
The first time I did the exercise, Sam had just finished telling us that she writes with the enjoyment of her smartest, closest friend in mind--a fellow writer who, although their lives could not be more different, "got" her writing better than anyone else. I said that I wrote for one of my very good (due to some childhood trauma, I feel wildly uncomfortable using the term "best friend") friends. I don't remember what explanation I gave, but I wrote it completely aware that the books this friend and I enjoy reading couldn't be more different--and one of us sometimes can have a pretty strong antipathy for the books the other loves. So if you extrapolate that I'd write the kinds of things I'd want to read, it's almost an O. Henry level of laughable that I'd imagine myself writing anything they'd really like.
The second time I did the exercise I knew I couldn't bring myself to tell the lie about my friend again, but if I didn't write for a friend, or my family, or the ghost of some long-dead poet or scribe, who did I write for? Process of elimination left me with the idea of writing for myself, and that sounded good (and also rang a little true, since I don't really go to any effort to prepare my pieces for publication) and so I wrote that. And Sam was highly pleased with me, like I'd had an epiphanic moment right there. And since I'm Sam Dunn's total little fangirl, I was giddy and pleased with myself and convinced it was the right answer.
Only. . . I felt guilty, too, because I knew that response wasn't really true. I don't write for myself. My goodness, writing for myself is such a chore. I don't think I'd write at all if I was my only audience. I feel light-years of emotional distance from writers who have to write, writers who say they'd drown in their own thoughts if they couldn't at least scribble on a soup can label. Who can lock themselves away and write, and write, and write for hours and feel catharsis at the end.
I am so not that kind of writer. I am not that kind of person. Funny again, because I love being alone with my thoughts. I was an only child, no friends within walking distance but tons of books and even to this day I find myself explaining (but then even only to those I really trust) that being alone, thinking, reading a book, noodling around on the Internet--that's an activity for me. Like mini-golf or going to a bar. I set aside time for it. I plan long stretches of nothing. It takes me a lot longer to get bored than most people.
So I'm already inside my own head a lot, by choice. Thinking about things. Re-thinking. Thinking from a different angle. Thinking about them as another person. Imagining all sorts of real and wildly fantastical scenarios. Should make me a great writer, right? Lots of stuff going on up there to get down on paper!
But. Why? Why do I need to get it down on paper? I've already worked it out in my head. It's there. It's made me happy, or sad, or given me that catharsis or occupied me on a long flight. It's done. I don't need to revisit it; don't need to write it down so I can look at it again. I'll remember. If it was just for me, there's no way even the Secret of Life, the Universe and Everything would go from synapse to text.
Even the Typepad blog, started a few months ago just to get into the habit of writing again, had gone unloved more days than not. It was such a chore, such a hassle to think of something to write, and then write it and then obsessively check my stats counter to see whether anyone had read it that day--and if I did have visitors, why hadn't they commented? And maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a writer, and it's just too bad that my untaught semi-effortlessness with standard English grammar and ability to discourse at length on almost any literary theme (with verbal footnotes and annotations!) was going to waste away because I just didn't like writing.
But it didn't feel right, and I knew that I loved writing emails to my friends, and am quite the one for longwinded messageboard posts, and I'd really been active on Livejournal several years ago, before I stopped, and all that had been unhesitatingly fun. So I decided to give LJ a try one more time, to see if there was some piece I was trying to fit in the wrong way. Before I gave the Bronx cheer to any dream I still had of a creatively fulfilling career and resigned myself to corporate PR, and then death.
And here I am, on a Wednesday night, waiting for my toenail paint to dry and practically itching to post here. "What do I have to say? Do I have anything to write? I just wrote a long thing yesterday; will anyone want to read it? I need to write something!" And it hits me, and I finally have my Helen-Keller-under-the-water-spigot moment worthy of Sam Dunn: I don't write for myself. I don't write for someone else. I write for everyone. Anyone. I am so desperately in need of having an audience, of any demographic, knowing that my words are being read. And with Livejournal, with this format, I know that.
I know for a fact that the dozen (20? 30? I don't know; not checking right now) people who have me on their Friends list will at least see this post sometime tonight or tomorrow. Some of them might even comment, and then I'll know for a fact that they've read it. My site counter will tell me who else stops by after I hit "post," and it'll be some satisfyingly (to me) high number, just through the nature of this site's traffic flow and random Internet traffic. And that will make me actually happy inside. The idea that I might have been a part of someone else's day, that something I wrote made one person reflective, or happy, or even irate--I can't describe why that makes this loner only child so satisfied (though I'm sure the one has a good deal to do with the other, which is why they're next to each other in that sentence), but it does.
I don't write for a friend. I don't write for myself. I don't write for one person at all. I want to write for everyone. I want something I say, even just one paragraph, one thought, one turn of phrase in a larger piece, to have a resonance for anyone who comes across it. I want them to forward it to their friends and say, "look--she's . . . " She's. . .whatever. Whatever it is, that's what I want. When I think of writing, I want to entertain. To capture and inspire. And the limitations or limitlessness of my aim is such that I couldn't feel I'd accomplished that if writing with a single reader in mind.
And that--I cannot tell you how good it feels to know that.