TUMBLR
Posts tagged "readers"
It hadn’t occurred to me to read any of the comments, but of course I couldn’t resist. Most were really thoughtful and encouraging; a few were stunningly vitriolic. (I know, I know, but it’s hard to brush these things off. Artists who say they aren’t bothered by negative feedback are kidding themselves.)
My first response to some of the comments was “Wow, that’s cold,” then, “Oh, but you haven’t been listening” — and then, “Really, you speak as if I have some choice over what I write and if I have some obligation to address the things you or the average American might care about.”
There’s a whole industry devoted to writing songs pitched toward a certain demographic. All I can do is write about what I care about and hope you might relate. And if not, here are some sweet melodies. This is my life’s work and I’ve been immersed in it so long that I can’t really extract one from the other. So I kept envisioning one of those bumper stickers on the back of a semi-trailer that says, “How’s my driving? Call…” I kept thinking “How’s my living?” as if were taking suggestions.
…
I wouldn’t go so far as to say songwriters are seer-poets wired to receive transmissions from the ether, but I think we’ve all got a well that can be tapped and there follows the sort of sequencing or curating of one’s own ideas. It’s the content of that well I can’t claim responsibility for.
DFW: ON NOT HAVING CONTEMPT FOR YOUR READERS
- David Foster WallaceIf you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
More about me
See my work
Archives
Random post
Likes
RSS Feed
Contact me
Twitter
Flickr
Facebook
BACK TO THE TOP