Preface: Kadambari's Assumed Audience
On her blog, Maggie Appleton explains the benefits of specifying, at the beginning of a piece of writing, who the assumed audience is: it "free[s] both of us [the reader and the writer] of unspoken obligations and expectations. As the writer, I am now free to write for an informed audience without defining every term and qualifying every statement. We can jump straight to the gritty details and contentious debates rather than doing a full literature review of the field."
There are millions of posts on the art, craft, and business of writing on the internet, not to mention all the books and articles in print magazines. Why, then, am I writing this "online book" of mine?
Kadambari is my attempt to share everything I've learned about writing over the last eight years. I've read thousands of articles and stories, hundreds of books, and written a million and a half words. I've kept what worked for me, changed methods and modified them to suit my needs, and discarded the rest. You could do everything I did and end up with very different lessons. You would also be spending a significant amount of time doing so.
When we share what we know, we are saving people time. We're exploring our way through an unfamiliar area, then suggesting others how they could get there with much less effort.
We're all mortal. We're not guaranteed a long life. There's so much all of us want to do, so much of the world we want to experience. Which is why I believe that it is noble to save people's time by sharing what we know.
I am a young writer myself, and so Kadambari's assumed audience includes people who haven't written anything before but want to.
I don't know what kind of lessons apply when someone has already retired and have a lifetime of experiences they bring with them to their notebooks, but I do know what it is like to be sixteen, to have had a very average childhood, mostly deprived of books, and a stubborn determination to become nothing but a writer when she grows up.
I am writing for young writers, for those who are getting started and for those who have yet to read a lot of books and stories and essays. I am writing for people whose first language isn't English (it's my third) but who have a fair grasp over it (like I do, because I started learning it in school, right from kindergarten).
This does not mean that anyone who's older or more experienced than me would not find anything of use here. There are some aspects of the process, such as the fear of failure, perfectionism, lack of ideas, self-doubt, etc. that we all experience, and I hope that when I talk about those problems here, older writers will be able to find comfort, company, or a new perspective in what I write. (Perhaps they might even be inspired to write about their experiences and advice on the same.)
Mainly, however, I am writing this book as if I am speaking to my younger self, who has a lot to learn about writing. Of course, I've learned what I did through trial and error, and I remember those lessons because of those errors, so I wouldn't want my past self to not experience any difficulties at all.
However, there are some lessons she'd learned and forgotten, and has had to learn over and over again. I hope that by recording all of them here, the book will act as a home to return to during the times when I---and you, dear reader---struggle with writing. Kadambari is for me, both present and past, and for all (young) writers who want to learn how to write.