You offer a passage that captures something that took me a long time to learn ... admittedly not until my mid 30s.
“As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or not to invite it into our lives.” Too much pretense, rawness, or redundancy, and the reader shuts the door in the poem’s face. But even if the reader invites the poem in, “it may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed.”
That's one of the best succinct descriptions I've ever seen.
Personally, I still tend to commit the sin of "rawness," though not from ignorance.
Some unusual audience feedback. Since you're talking so much about audiences. I tend to take at least 30 minutes to read a column, and usually come back to it two or three times. I write a lot of comments, like a conversation, and actually post about half of them. I suspect that's not a typical reading pattern.
I suspect you are right: not many readers devote that kind of time and attention, especially to something as ostensibly ephemeral as a blog/Substack post! I'm grateful for your care. It's one thing I miss about teaching, though, that slow reading punctuated by annotations and bookmarks. I still read slowly, but I don't often take the time to mark up my books these days, which does mean giving up some intimacy. I salute you!
I devote that much attention, though not time, to everything I read. Or I don't read it. It also comes with the territory of being a historian, as one simply cannot breeze by without the slow process of calibrating historical and cultural perspective as an absolute minimum requirement. And it's usually quickly obvious to us scholars when someone can't do it.
Earlier, you mention historic British authors and how it alienated you. As a youth, I read that stuff with the same state of mind as I read all the golden age scifi and fantasy. It's a story. It's interesting. I'd like to dwell in their world awhile. So, now, when I read (mostly "trashy") literature, I do it to dwell in another place. I as audience member want that. Although I'll admit that low brow scifi/fantasy is not a good place for that. What I find interesting, personally, is how much I liked LE Modesit Jr, whose writing is so repetitive and formulaic ... and yet it was like a lullaby as the formula just allowed me to drift. I just can't do that with Melville!
I do, sometimes, wonder what the author wants with me, ya know?
There is another side to the issue of writing for an audience, and you didn't go where I expected your essay to go. What came to mind to me is how illiterate our society at large has become. A number of times I briefly teamed up with a Lit prof to teach a Philosophy through golden age scifi course--which kept falling through--but now I dare not attempt it because I couldn't find anyone who'd actually be able to read want was intended for general consumption in roughly the 1960s through 80s. Stuff like Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Maybe Herbert's Dune. Some Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler (she *finally* came into vogue), Clarke, Asimov, etc. Now, I know that the plan would never have worked, as most of those books are far to advanced to my typical student, or too long.
Intimacy, in this context, means writing like we're two people talking. talking about ourselves, our interests, even if it's a little odd for the setting, e.g., blog. But, I figured that is actually part of what you want as author. Only part. This is in some way the conversation of academe without the academy. The writing styles of many of the other authors connected to you almost all have the strong dialect of academe. I figured it was not coincidence.
As for myself, there is no life of the mind at my institution. It's wholly given to the transactional. Only one of my colleagues regularly bemoans this. And this is a far better setting than Facebook, where agreeing to disagree too often seems barred in "academic facebook."
Yes, excellent point about literacy. I have to be careful with this, because I realize that I can come off as a snob. My brother-in-law (an attorney, and a thoughtful person) recently recommended a TV drama that I enjoyed. But I also had some thoughts on craft -- plausibility questions that made me stop believing in the narrative dream. That made everyone apologetic -- "to each his own," etc. But I wasn't saying it was awful at all. Exchanges like this make me realize that I'm in a very small minority of readers and viewers in caring about enough about craft to examine it -- and in wanting to be stretched a bit, in the ways that filmmakers like Kieslowski and Bergman once did (surely there are more contemporary artists doing the same).
The series in this case was Anatomy of a Scandal, and I think my plausibility questions are germane to the larger discussion of power, sexual assault, and consent that drives the plot. But there are many viewers who are content to be manipulated by a story, so long as it provides entertainment or escape.
It has been a relief to see my eldest daughter aging out of the trash that is peddled by YA imprints. There's some great stuff, too -- Wolves of the Beyond, Wings of Fire. But I nearly shredded a Dog Man book that she was reading once, because the opening frames were making fun of Dickens and other "deep" literature. To hell with that. The secret to getting kids to read more is not to give them trash to read.
There is no cultural victory to be won in these discussions, really. People will read what they want. If someone wants to take the time to write a romance like one I saw announced on Twitter recently (Breakfast with the Billionaire), and if people want to buy it, none of my grumpy old man comments will move any needle anywhere. But, yes, the question of writing to audience includes the question of whether there is an audience out there to reach that cares enough about the same things.
What motivates my comment about literacy is more professional than social or cultural.
About 1 in 4 of my students taking a second year course read near grade level. At this very moment, in fact, I'm reading anonymous survey results, and complaints about the reading abound. Well, the textbook is at 10th grade level with no primary reading required, and the assignments were run through evaluation software using 4 metrics and run from 5th to 10th grade, and averaging 8th. And just recently, you may have heard that only 1 in 3 young Americans read at grade level.
So, back to professionalism. As a professor in a field that requires the pinnacle of reading comprehension and abstract thinking, I'm deeply concerning with the science of reading, of curricular planning for an audience who doesn't or cannot read at grade level, and of getting them enough up to speed so that A and B students have a fair chance of completing a four year degree when they transfer.
If a person still reads such concerns as snobbish, which would shock me, well... pick your preferred disparaging comment.
Oh, I'm also a scholar of John Dewey, the philosopher of education, who was the subject of my dissertation. So ... I have a lot of thoughts about education theory and making education work in ... less than ideal circumstances?
I mention this to broaden the conversation about audience and to specify where I was coming from.
There is loads here I could comment on but I wish to restrict myself to just a couple.
Firstly, the idea of a reader inviting you into their home is a great metaphor. I've long felt that to be the case, in effect, but the other way round, ie as a reader. For example, call me a prude, but when I see books or blog posts with the word "f*ck* in the title my immediate response is: why would I want that so-called writing polluting my home? I mean, if you came into my house and started swearing I'd ask you to stop, and if you didn't I'd ask you to leave. I realise that in some cases it can be humorous, or to illustrate justifiable anger, and that's fair enough. But if it's a cynical ploy to draw in more readers through outrage, or simply because the writer is inarticulate, I'm not interested. People's time, and their space, are sacrosanct and should be treated accordingly. In I think an analogous way, I read once that the Lebanese poet Gibran was once given a prize for his beautiful writing in English. Someone asked him how he was able to achieve that, given that English wasn't his first language, and he replied something to the effect of "When one is a guest in another person's house one obeys the rules"
Secondly, I don't know your friend, obviously, but his view that potential readers would slam the door in his face seems to me to be depriving some readers of something they would love. I suppose I can understand it from an economic point of view: why spend a year labouring over something that is going to bring in little or no money? But he also seems to be second guessing what the rest of the world will think. Isn't that, in a strange kind of way, immensely egotistical?
On a more general point, writing for a particular audience (a niche audience) is definitely a good way of building up a readership. It's certainly what Substack recommends. However, I've done that with other (non-Substack) newsletters, and I decided that I wanted to use my Substack one to write about stuff I'm interested in, which could range from literature to a strange sign I saw on a bus stop. I'm slowly but surely building up a decent sized and engaged readership. Ultimately, as someone in the Substack office hours said last Thursday, you (as in the writer) are the niche, the unique 'thing' for want of a better word. So I suppose going back to your analogy, I write for myself, and hope that some people will open the door to me!
I bet there is a way to willfully read The Confidence Man as a plaint by Melville about how much more he would have preferred to write full time. If so , the sarcasm in thereshould evaporate. Myself am motivated to write by all the unused adjectives and i see you in minds eye feeling similarly. I mean if you can hang an evergreen with all the ornaments of civilization it would mean you were there in the woods where we belong. I believe we mostly storify simple happenstance out of people pleasing desire, i know that Kerouac over did itand came toa hard stop. But the thing you forgot to mention was that it is jealosy jealousy above all we are really demon fighting in writing. A damaging and obsessive emotion. If you can writeand help your reader payfor their ticket the way Dylan does without giving them a chance to feel deprived, now that is something that identity writing just flies in the face of. I hardly think it is wise to enjoy a hurricane. Confidence, these phones we really lay them down in order to sleep. If people are going to hear any stories other than efficiency organization charts it was because we took the time to tell the story. Now Gary Snyder says all is anothing , but we know what perspective he is speaking from. Talk is food i think. If you have nutritious chicken soup to share, is not that an energy give away, and simply more fun the closer to the quick pace of talk you come across.
Good point here: "If people are going to hear any stories other than efficiency organization charts it was because we took the time to tell the story." Exactly right!
I'm going to sit with this for a while. You've written something gorgeous here and I appreciate being reminded of King's "door shut" vs. "door open" language. And the metaphor of "house guest" in not just the digital age but in my digital business is one I'm very much invested in figuring out for myself. I think I reflexively go to a place where my coaching business is MY living room into which I'm inviting people. But that is a rather unexamined stance. I wonder what happens if I focus instead on being invited into their homes . . . how my language or stance or thoughts about our relationship might change. Thank you.
How interesting -- I'd not thought about your coaching business in this way, but it makes sense. I muddied the metaphor a bit with the King reference, but I really do think it works both ways: with the reader or the text/product/business on the doorstep.
It's interesting that what made James, Wharton, and Austen indisgestible to you made them palatable to me, as a fellow working-class college student. though we've discuss a pivotal difference between us.
I still harbor a great love for Victorian English which is reinforced by how much better that period of English harmonizes with modern French, particularly common clausal structures that in contemporary English seem either archaic or hopelessly academic. Study of French and French literature was one of my escapes in graduate school.
But this also leads to your point about how a "house guest" must assume a "general code of manners," which I find that very few, student or peer, do. It's also like only profesional writers do that anymore ... but I cannot tell how much of that generalizes or is just my physical or virtual locale.
Sometimes, I engage in a little too much "rawness" as a exasperant defiance and outrage against a lack of a general code of manners, though I write more about various forms of communication and not just writing. I am much less successfull than Frederick Douglas, "What, To the Slave, is the Fourth of July" (title edited). Though ... I'm not sure what success would look like....
Ah, well, I am no Francophile. Give me Granada or Prague over Paris any day :). Rawness has its place. I think part of my argument here is that rawness can be an asset (or a cynical tactic) in a polarized time. Ted Kooser's vision, which I have embraced for most of my professional writing life, may depend too much on something like old-fashioned manners. Ted prefers to err on the side of being endearing and charming. I hope to write with an edge, but not to be so indulgent of "edginess" as to estrange readers. It's a balancing act, a perpetual series of judgment calls.
I learned French because I lived near French Canada, and originally learned Quebecois French. (Being an infant in Mons, Belgium only counts in spirit.) Really messed me up when I studied Parisian French in graduate school, e.g., nasal e is significantly different as the "en" in "en garde!" The only places I've spoken French in its native habitat in Quebec and Morocco. And the Moroccan dialect was rooough. So, other than touching down in Charles De Gaulle, I've never been to France.
I haven't had formal training near your level, but I have mentioned JL Austen and Jayson Blair for personal inspirations. But perhaps I'd add Arthur C. Clarke with occasional bouts of divine madness that make me sound like William James. Possessed by the gods, I am!
Or maybe it's just the fact that all my actual writing for the last decade has been professional, e.g., pedagogical, administrative, or managerial, and I just feel the need to explode out of that. My actually published stuff was a little too Spinoza-esque. <shiver>
But to less navel-gazing matters. I have been quite amused at the stylistic differences between the Inner Life members. I've been entertaining myself getting a feel for the literary personas in the pieces.
I agree to a point, but I'd say that this piece captures exactly what I *don't* want to be doing on Substack, which is intentionally stoking outrage. Sure, it's bizarre to rewrite Dahl posthumously. The same could be done to Willa Cather, who includes some stunningly awful portraits of Black people in her work. It is truly appalling that Cather wrote, in 1940, in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, that emancipated slaves were begging to be taken back in by the families that had enslaved them. It's clear that. Hopkins has a lane, and it serves his purpose. I'm saying that I don't have a lane here. I'm not in either his camp or in the camp advocating for sensitivity readers. If I were writing more strategically to a particular audience, I'd pick one of those lanes and stoke it. That feels dishonest to me.
You offer a passage that captures something that took me a long time to learn ... admittedly not until my mid 30s.
“As readers we open the door of the book or magazine, look into the face of the poem, and decide whether or not to invite it into our lives.” Too much pretense, rawness, or redundancy, and the reader shuts the door in the poem’s face. But even if the reader invites the poem in, “it may tire or offend or bore its hostess and be promptly dismissed.”
That's one of the best succinct descriptions I've ever seen.
Personally, I still tend to commit the sin of "rawness," though not from ignorance.
Some unusual audience feedback. Since you're talking so much about audiences. I tend to take at least 30 minutes to read a column, and usually come back to it two or three times. I write a lot of comments, like a conversation, and actually post about half of them. I suspect that's not a typical reading pattern.
I suspect you are right: not many readers devote that kind of time and attention, especially to something as ostensibly ephemeral as a blog/Substack post! I'm grateful for your care. It's one thing I miss about teaching, though, that slow reading punctuated by annotations and bookmarks. I still read slowly, but I don't often take the time to mark up my books these days, which does mean giving up some intimacy. I salute you!
I devote that much attention, though not time, to everything I read. Or I don't read it. It also comes with the territory of being a historian, as one simply cannot breeze by without the slow process of calibrating historical and cultural perspective as an absolute minimum requirement. And it's usually quickly obvious to us scholars when someone can't do it.
Earlier, you mention historic British authors and how it alienated you. As a youth, I read that stuff with the same state of mind as I read all the golden age scifi and fantasy. It's a story. It's interesting. I'd like to dwell in their world awhile. So, now, when I read (mostly "trashy") literature, I do it to dwell in another place. I as audience member want that. Although I'll admit that low brow scifi/fantasy is not a good place for that. What I find interesting, personally, is how much I liked LE Modesit Jr, whose writing is so repetitive and formulaic ... and yet it was like a lullaby as the formula just allowed me to drift. I just can't do that with Melville!
I do, sometimes, wonder what the author wants with me, ya know?
There is another side to the issue of writing for an audience, and you didn't go where I expected your essay to go. What came to mind to me is how illiterate our society at large has become. A number of times I briefly teamed up with a Lit prof to teach a Philosophy through golden age scifi course--which kept falling through--but now I dare not attempt it because I couldn't find anyone who'd actually be able to read want was intended for general consumption in roughly the 1960s through 80s. Stuff like Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Maybe Herbert's Dune. Some Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler (she *finally* came into vogue), Clarke, Asimov, etc. Now, I know that the plan would never have worked, as most of those books are far to advanced to my typical student, or too long.
Intimacy, in this context, means writing like we're two people talking. talking about ourselves, our interests, even if it's a little odd for the setting, e.g., blog. But, I figured that is actually part of what you want as author. Only part. This is in some way the conversation of academe without the academy. The writing styles of many of the other authors connected to you almost all have the strong dialect of academe. I figured it was not coincidence.
As for myself, there is no life of the mind at my institution. It's wholly given to the transactional. Only one of my colleagues regularly bemoans this. And this is a far better setting than Facebook, where agreeing to disagree too often seems barred in "academic facebook."
Yes, excellent point about literacy. I have to be careful with this, because I realize that I can come off as a snob. My brother-in-law (an attorney, and a thoughtful person) recently recommended a TV drama that I enjoyed. But I also had some thoughts on craft -- plausibility questions that made me stop believing in the narrative dream. That made everyone apologetic -- "to each his own," etc. But I wasn't saying it was awful at all. Exchanges like this make me realize that I'm in a very small minority of readers and viewers in caring about enough about craft to examine it -- and in wanting to be stretched a bit, in the ways that filmmakers like Kieslowski and Bergman once did (surely there are more contemporary artists doing the same).
The series in this case was Anatomy of a Scandal, and I think my plausibility questions are germane to the larger discussion of power, sexual assault, and consent that drives the plot. But there are many viewers who are content to be manipulated by a story, so long as it provides entertainment or escape.
It has been a relief to see my eldest daughter aging out of the trash that is peddled by YA imprints. There's some great stuff, too -- Wolves of the Beyond, Wings of Fire. But I nearly shredded a Dog Man book that she was reading once, because the opening frames were making fun of Dickens and other "deep" literature. To hell with that. The secret to getting kids to read more is not to give them trash to read.
There is no cultural victory to be won in these discussions, really. People will read what they want. If someone wants to take the time to write a romance like one I saw announced on Twitter recently (Breakfast with the Billionaire), and if people want to buy it, none of my grumpy old man comments will move any needle anywhere. But, yes, the question of writing to audience includes the question of whether there is an audience out there to reach that cares enough about the same things.
What motivates my comment about literacy is more professional than social or cultural.
About 1 in 4 of my students taking a second year course read near grade level. At this very moment, in fact, I'm reading anonymous survey results, and complaints about the reading abound. Well, the textbook is at 10th grade level with no primary reading required, and the assignments were run through evaluation software using 4 metrics and run from 5th to 10th grade, and averaging 8th. And just recently, you may have heard that only 1 in 3 young Americans read at grade level.
So, back to professionalism. As a professor in a field that requires the pinnacle of reading comprehension and abstract thinking, I'm deeply concerning with the science of reading, of curricular planning for an audience who doesn't or cannot read at grade level, and of getting them enough up to speed so that A and B students have a fair chance of completing a four year degree when they transfer.
If a person still reads such concerns as snobbish, which would shock me, well... pick your preferred disparaging comment.
Oh, I'm also a scholar of John Dewey, the philosopher of education, who was the subject of my dissertation. So ... I have a lot of thoughts about education theory and making education work in ... less than ideal circumstances?
I mention this to broaden the conversation about audience and to specify where I was coming from.
There is loads here I could comment on but I wish to restrict myself to just a couple.
Firstly, the idea of a reader inviting you into their home is a great metaphor. I've long felt that to be the case, in effect, but the other way round, ie as a reader. For example, call me a prude, but when I see books or blog posts with the word "f*ck* in the title my immediate response is: why would I want that so-called writing polluting my home? I mean, if you came into my house and started swearing I'd ask you to stop, and if you didn't I'd ask you to leave. I realise that in some cases it can be humorous, or to illustrate justifiable anger, and that's fair enough. But if it's a cynical ploy to draw in more readers through outrage, or simply because the writer is inarticulate, I'm not interested. People's time, and their space, are sacrosanct and should be treated accordingly. In I think an analogous way, I read once that the Lebanese poet Gibran was once given a prize for his beautiful writing in English. Someone asked him how he was able to achieve that, given that English wasn't his first language, and he replied something to the effect of "When one is a guest in another person's house one obeys the rules"
Secondly, I don't know your friend, obviously, but his view that potential readers would slam the door in his face seems to me to be depriving some readers of something they would love. I suppose I can understand it from an economic point of view: why spend a year labouring over something that is going to bring in little or no money? But he also seems to be second guessing what the rest of the world will think. Isn't that, in a strange kind of way, immensely egotistical?
On a more general point, writing for a particular audience (a niche audience) is definitely a good way of building up a readership. It's certainly what Substack recommends. However, I've done that with other (non-Substack) newsletters, and I decided that I wanted to use my Substack one to write about stuff I'm interested in, which could range from literature to a strange sign I saw on a bus stop. I'm slowly but surely building up a decent sized and engaged readership. Ultimately, as someone in the Substack office hours said last Thursday, you (as in the writer) are the niche, the unique 'thing' for want of a better word. So I suppose going back to your analogy, I write for myself, and hope that some people will open the door to me!
I bet there is a way to willfully read The Confidence Man as a plaint by Melville about how much more he would have preferred to write full time. If so , the sarcasm in thereshould evaporate. Myself am motivated to write by all the unused adjectives and i see you in minds eye feeling similarly. I mean if you can hang an evergreen with all the ornaments of civilization it would mean you were there in the woods where we belong. I believe we mostly storify simple happenstance out of people pleasing desire, i know that Kerouac over did itand came toa hard stop. But the thing you forgot to mention was that it is jealosy jealousy above all we are really demon fighting in writing. A damaging and obsessive emotion. If you can writeand help your reader payfor their ticket the way Dylan does without giving them a chance to feel deprived, now that is something that identity writing just flies in the face of. I hardly think it is wise to enjoy a hurricane. Confidence, these phones we really lay them down in order to sleep. If people are going to hear any stories other than efficiency organization charts it was because we took the time to tell the story. Now Gary Snyder says all is anothing , but we know what perspective he is speaking from. Talk is food i think. If you have nutritious chicken soup to share, is not that an energy give away, and simply more fun the closer to the quick pace of talk you come across.
Good point here: "If people are going to hear any stories other than efficiency organization charts it was because we took the time to tell the story." Exactly right!
I'm going to sit with this for a while. You've written something gorgeous here and I appreciate being reminded of King's "door shut" vs. "door open" language. And the metaphor of "house guest" in not just the digital age but in my digital business is one I'm very much invested in figuring out for myself. I think I reflexively go to a place where my coaching business is MY living room into which I'm inviting people. But that is a rather unexamined stance. I wonder what happens if I focus instead on being invited into their homes . . . how my language or stance or thoughts about our relationship might change. Thank you.
How interesting -- I'd not thought about your coaching business in this way, but it makes sense. I muddied the metaphor a bit with the King reference, but I really do think it works both ways: with the reader or the text/product/business on the doorstep.
It's interesting that what made James, Wharton, and Austen indisgestible to you made them palatable to me, as a fellow working-class college student. though we've discuss a pivotal difference between us.
I still harbor a great love for Victorian English which is reinforced by how much better that period of English harmonizes with modern French, particularly common clausal structures that in contemporary English seem either archaic or hopelessly academic. Study of French and French literature was one of my escapes in graduate school.
But this also leads to your point about how a "house guest" must assume a "general code of manners," which I find that very few, student or peer, do. It's also like only profesional writers do that anymore ... but I cannot tell how much of that generalizes or is just my physical or virtual locale.
Sometimes, I engage in a little too much "rawness" as a exasperant defiance and outrage against a lack of a general code of manners, though I write more about various forms of communication and not just writing. I am much less successfull than Frederick Douglas, "What, To the Slave, is the Fourth of July" (title edited). Though ... I'm not sure what success would look like....
Ah, well, I am no Francophile. Give me Granada or Prague over Paris any day :). Rawness has its place. I think part of my argument here is that rawness can be an asset (or a cynical tactic) in a polarized time. Ted Kooser's vision, which I have embraced for most of my professional writing life, may depend too much on something like old-fashioned manners. Ted prefers to err on the side of being endearing and charming. I hope to write with an edge, but not to be so indulgent of "edginess" as to estrange readers. It's a balancing act, a perpetual series of judgment calls.
Wrong places.
I learned French because I lived near French Canada, and originally learned Quebecois French. (Being an infant in Mons, Belgium only counts in spirit.) Really messed me up when I studied Parisian French in graduate school, e.g., nasal e is significantly different as the "en" in "en garde!" The only places I've spoken French in its native habitat in Quebec and Morocco. And the Moroccan dialect was rooough. So, other than touching down in Charles De Gaulle, I've never been to France.
I haven't had formal training near your level, but I have mentioned JL Austen and Jayson Blair for personal inspirations. But perhaps I'd add Arthur C. Clarke with occasional bouts of divine madness that make me sound like William James. Possessed by the gods, I am!
Or maybe it's just the fact that all my actual writing for the last decade has been professional, e.g., pedagogical, administrative, or managerial, and I just feel the need to explode out of that. My actually published stuff was a little too Spinoza-esque. <shiver>
But to less navel-gazing matters. I have been quite amused at the stylistic differences between the Inner Life members. I've been entertaining myself getting a feel for the literary personas in the pieces.
CJ Hopkins wrote a piece that has a similar theme, might be worth your time.
https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/the-war-on-insensitivity
I agree to a point, but I'd say that this piece captures exactly what I *don't* want to be doing on Substack, which is intentionally stoking outrage. Sure, it's bizarre to rewrite Dahl posthumously. The same could be done to Willa Cather, who includes some stunningly awful portraits of Black people in her work. It is truly appalling that Cather wrote, in 1940, in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, that emancipated slaves were begging to be taken back in by the families that had enslaved them. It's clear that. Hopkins has a lane, and it serves his purpose. I'm saying that I don't have a lane here. I'm not in either his camp or in the camp advocating for sensitivity readers. If I were writing more strategically to a particular audience, I'd pick one of those lanes and stoke it. That feels dishonest to me.