#9 - On Giving Advice and Writing for An Ideal Reader
This is a story. Offered in the hope it intrigues or amuses. It is not a template. I don’t think there are templates for the creative process, beyond the very basic, obvious one: if you don’t do it, it won’t get done. Putting in the hours. Trudging up the hill, metaphorically, when the cool people are still dancing.
Guy Gavriel Kay, "Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice"
Over and over, I've pointed out in these essays how I'm writing as if my younger self could read the lessons I've learned after eight years of writing. However, I'm finding that this is not a useful way for me to work on this book.
Part of it comes from the utterly disappointing fact that I know my younger self cannot actually read these essays, and so pretending that I'm writing to her doesn't work for me. So to make it work, when I wrote about the assumed audience for this book, I added "young writers" to my target demographic.
It helped, but only to an extent---it wasn't just a matter of who would be reading these essays but what the advice in them was.
I'm wary of using the word "advice"---I'm only 23, and, there are no rules to writing. I'm also aware that the circumstances of the American male writers who gave the writing advice I grew up reading were very different from my circumstances as a lower-middle class girl who lived with her family in India. Given everyone's unique contexts and the undeniable fact that what works for one writer won't necessarily work for another (except reading a lot and writing a lot), I'm hesitant to make any prescriptions. I try not to use "should" and "must" statements.
Yet, because I decided to write with an assumed audience of young writers , my words molded themselves to address and accommodate them, with the result that I am now uncomfortable when drafting these essays---I said I won't advise or prescribe, but I ended up doing so anyway.
This discomfort is why I took six days to write essay #9. Whenever I chose a topic, the words that came to me didn't feel right. I was giving advice, and when I remembered that I aimed not to, I tried to be accommodating, with the result that I sounded frustratingly ambivalent.
I had to remind myself that this is the first draft of Kadambari. I chose the assumed audience; I can change who it is. Not my younger self, because I know she can't read these words, and not other young writers, because I don't know any.
Who then? For eight years, I wrote without an Ideal Reader, as Stephen King calls them in his book, On Writing. I never addressed any of my blog posts or essays or short stories to any person, living or dead, real or fictional. I just wrote.
When I'd read Maggie Appleton's blog post on the concept of assumed audiences, it had made a lot of sense, so I tried it. Eight essays in, I've found that this approach is clearly not working for me and making an easy topic difficult to write about.
So from now on, I am going to write as I always have, share what worked for me and didn't (like having an assumed audience) without trying to accommodate everyone. If I have to assume anything about my audience, I'll assume that they are smart enough, after reading these essays, to decide for themselves whether there's something they could borrow from it.
Accept that art happens in the midst of life and life changes on you and changes you, makes demands, imposes constraints. Do what you can through and around those, and if someone’s suggestions help, make you feel better—that’s all right, too! Just don’t let anyone’s words make you feel inadequate, not properly committed, unworthy.
Everyone has anecdotes, sometimes they are interesting, sometimes they can get in your way. Make your own call. Don’t assume that because someone has had a measure of success they can tell you how to do it.
Guy Gavriel Kay, "Some Writing Advice: Don’t Take Others’ Advice"