This One's For You & Me (Or "Who Am I Writing For?")

"Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."

- Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver wrote my favorite book, The Poisonwood Bible. And therefore, she holds a special place in my heart as an author. She's extremely talented at constructing believable, redeemable, and wonderful characters, and her plots are always so rich in emotion with just the right balance of comedy and drama. And this quote above has now solidified its place as one of my favorites.

Writers write best when they write for themselves. Perhaps that sounds selfish, so let me attempt to qualify that statement throughout this post. I think that the main question a writer has to answer (regardless of if they are writing poetry, prose, screenplay, etc.) is who they are ultimately writing for. Audience is important, but it is not the end-all-be-all factor in writing. Let me explain.

There is a reason that I love to read the work of other people - other authors and poets, specifically. I love that my mind can be engaged in such a way that only they are able to do. Kingsolver, for example, wrote The Bean Trees, which is just a fantastic book about this young woman who goes on a cross-country road trip and finds herself traveling with a little Native American girl. And in all actuality, the book is nothing spectacular - and by spectacular, I mean that it's not a story that is revolutionary or ground-breaking. But it is real. Every emotion, every nuance is true to the story and to Kingsolver herself.

I suppose that it would be absurd to tell you that writing for an audience is futile and unnecessary. I'd be lying to both you and myself if that were the case. But there is a distinct line of difference that separates the realm of  knowing your audience and writing for them. Writing for an audience does not allow your characters the freedom to be who they should be and do what they ought to do. Writing for an audience means that you are writing to cater them, and them alone. It's this trap that writers fall into because we want so desperately for someone to love our work, to call us genuises and to embrace our stories. But at what cost do we do this? Sadly, we usually compromise what is best for the characters and the plot in an attempt to please everyone. And, as cliche as the old saying is, when you try to please everyone, you usually end up pleasing no one.

Truly, as writers, the only thing we have to offer is ourselves - our honesty, our stories, our characters. If we attempt to squish these things into molds that will be "accepted" by an audience, we ultimately lose sight of the art of writing. We lose the point of it all. It is good to know who you are writing for. It is bad when they are the only people who matter. It's beneficial to find a target audience. Obviously, if you are writing a book about a high school heroine who goes on an adventure with her close friends the summer before she graduates, chances are that your target audience will be people of the same age. Of course, there will always be outliers to this theory, but bear with me. So, you write this story about this girl - it is received moderately by that age group. You find yourself on Amazon.com, scrolling through user comments regarding the book, and note that some people think that your character shouldn't have ended up with Guy X and instead should be with Guy Y. They also don't like the character of her mother - they believe she should be more accepting and less demanding of her teenage daughter.

What do you do?

As a writer, here is what I would suggest: do nothing.

I am often tempted to change my writing based on the opinions of others. And if you are in stages where your writing needs to be edited, and your editor suggests that you tighten up your story by making changes then yes - change away. However, when you let your audience dictate your story, that is where you begin to have issues. Because see, while one lone reviewer on Amazon.com felt that the character's mother was too harsh, the audience member on Barnes and Noble's website felt that she was too lax. If you base a character's behavior on anything other than your own gut instinct, and knowing how that character behaves (because writers have significant relationships with their characters, I believe), you will cause that character to become erratic - they will begin to wobble in personality, wants and needs, etc. And then, you will end up pleasing no one - not even that lone reviewer on Amazon.

So I suppose that the moral of our lesson is that we should strive to accept criticisms of our work by our peers. We should write for ourselves - or rather, write for our characters - rather than our audience. It is significantly important to know who our audience is. But we should never cater them, or write for them alone.

Writing, Writing, and Re-Writing (Or "Why I Have Learned the Importance of Revision")

"Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain."

- Elie Wiesel

I really admire that quote above, because I feel like it does sum up the process of writing so well. And I will admit - editing my own work is not one of my strongest suits. Today, I'm going to choose to discuss revisions, and why I have learned the importance of writing and re-writing your work in order to make it the best that it can possibly be.

When I first started writing poems and short stories, I was in seventh grade. I grew up in a small, rural town in Pennsylvania where we were required to take classes every year like Home Economics, Woodshop, and Keyboard (don't ask me why, because to this day I still do not know). In seventh grade, we were required to take both an English class and a Writing class. Writing was taught by this older, dark-haired and bespectacled woman named Miss DeNicoula. It was in that class that I learned how to appreciate writing, and - even more than that - fall in love with stories.

Looking back on the things that I wrote in sixth and seventh grade, it's no surprise that I find them to be...crap. I'll give myself credit for being creative, to an extent, but was I brilliant?  No. It's amazing though that I think of myself at the current time any differently. Who's to say that I won't look back on my writing ten years from now and think "Wow, this stuff is terrible"? That is why I've decided to implement a kind of rolling revision process.

Before I explain my process to you, I'll explain why I find revision so difficult. In our Advanced Poetry workshop my senior year of college, the ten or so of us in the class discussed what we find to be the most difficult thing about writing poetry. And most of us - unsurprisingly - said that revising poems was the most difficult feat. My reasoning was pretty much the same as my classmates' - when someone asks you to remove or add to your poem, you almost feel attacked, in a way. A poem is usually something quite personal, and we - as poets - like to feel that everything we write is sacred. If we come up with a phrase that we think is particularly brilliant, we pride ourselves in it. And the worst part is that we think that our words are so sacred that no one else should be able to touch them.

I think poetry is the most difficult thing to revise because it is so intimate and because it's (often) so short. In Advanced Fiction workshops, I had less difficulty revising when my peers or professor told me to develop a character more, or cut a certain scene. Though I was deeply attached to those words and phrases, it just felt less...personal, perhaps, than revising poetry does. And maybe the problem is similar to how we view rejection: walls are constructed. We get defensive when people constructively criticize our work, because we think that their comments and suggestions are some personal attack against us.

And yes, there are definitely exceptions to this case: I will not take every piece of advice that professors or peers give to me, namely because some of them are contradictory. One student may tell me that they love a line, while another may tell me to remove it. Obviously, when it comes down to it, revision is in the hands of the writer. You can tell yourself that you have a brilliant piece of work, and that it is perfect. But if it is getting constantly rejected every time you submit, chances are that you need to revise it. Revision is a healthy part of life. My Advanced Poetry workshop professor took years revising some of his poems until they were as good as they could be. And while I can honestly say that I have not taken years to revise one poem, I have taken the time to let the piece ferment, to distance myself from it so that I can look back on it from a clearer perspective.

So what exactly have been my struggles with revision? Personally, I find it easy to revise the work of others, as I am sure most of us would readily agree to. It's easy to read another person's poem and to be constructive with feedback. It's especially easy with strangers in workshops (like online workshops I have taken in the past where you never actually meet the person whose work you are commenting on), but I've found to be a bit more difficult in friends, and perhaps that's because I revert back to taking offense at everything that a friend may find "wrong" with my work. Or perhaps it is just because I like dishing criticism, but not taking it. Either way, that is definitely something that I struggle with.

So what is the actual purpose of revision? Why is it necessary? If a poem "sounds" right the first time that you write it, shouldn't it just stay that way? Here's where I'm in the process of learning - I'm beginning to realize that not everything I do is sacred. Not every word in my poem is sent from God to the ears of mortals. There are things in poems that I have sitting in my portfolio right now that could be better. We, as writers, need to realize that in order to be successful, we must be constantly evolving and growing. If you're stubborn and egotistical (which most of us are), your work will remain the stagnant. Notice that I didn't say "timeless"?

We, as writers, are attached to our work. It becomes an extension of us, somehow - like a child that we nurture. And, just like children, our work changes and grows. The words themselves will remain stale if we choose to not let them breathe, to refuse to edit because we want to keep things the way that they are. The trait of a mature writer is their ability to cut a paragraph or a phrase that they held so close to them in order to make sure that the overall work itself is the best it can possibly be.

And I'm not quite there, but - just like a lot of things in life - editing is all about baby steps.