All up in the (writing) feels

Maybe there's a simpler way to think about narrative

Reading time: approximately 8 minutes

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In my last piece, I mentioned…well, many things. In the aftermath of all those realizations, I wanted to explore more around the idea of writing for an audience, and how the audience often seems to not conceptually exist when we talk about writing fiction.

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{Ooof, that sounded so…scholarly? Unlike the last couple weeks, where my mind was on fire with new ideas and connections, this week the change my doctor made to my thyroid medication has me feeling fatigued and wired at the same time, unmotivated, and navigating occasional dizzy spells. But I want to keep this writing momentum, to keep exploring, even if I’m not at the top of my game.

Also, I’ve made the executive decision to return my meds to their previous dosage, where I felt great and full of energy without dizzy spells, so don’t you worry about that. 😊}

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In most nonfiction (expository) writing, as I noted before, the audience defines everything about the piece, from its tone to its structure, length, and content. The exact reason for this is because most nonfiction is written to inform the audience. There is absolutely a message that needs to be conveyed, and therefore the form of the message is the one that the writer most hopes their audience will easily consume. In technical writing, I want to tell you how this thing works, so I’m going to try to be as clear and concise as possible. In marketing, I want you to recognize my brand and know about my product, so I’m going to try to be as memorable as possible. Etc.

When I look up lists of advice for beginning fiction writers, the results are:

• Read a lot

• Write every day

• Write what you know

• Keep a journal

• Take the time to learn your craft

It’s all very writer-centric. Fiction writing is all about the writer, the individual alone in a room with their butt in a chair and their hands on a keyboard making magic happen one word after another. Experienced writers tell newbie writers that writing is a lonely job, that writing is a lonely life. It’s just a writer facing the blank page, over and over again.

I can tell you that after hearing that story of being a fiction writer ad nauseam, that’s what my experience of being a fiction writer has felt like. I labor alone in secret like a mad god, crafting worlds and people entirely from my imagination, dancing them around on strings of my devising, all unconsciously burdened with my hopes and fears and dreams. I know that no one might ever see this creation I have poured my heart and soul into, yet I feel compelled to continue anyway. It’s all very…..dramatic. Fetishized, even. (Parallels could be drawn to illustrate how this lone writer myth is a bizarre incarnation of American individualism, manifest destiny-ing all over the page, if one were so inclined.) And, honestly, unhealthy.

Comparatively, as I write this essay, I know you are there. I can feel you reading each word I write, and not in a weird creepy way, in a way that makes me work hard to capture meaning and pin it down for you with all the skill and craft that I have. So that we can understand each other better. When I write with you actively in mind, darling reader, writing doesn’t feel hard or lonely or insular. It feels like the start of an exciting conversation, one that will spark new ideas and insights and continue moving through the zeitgeist.

So how can we make that work in fiction? How does a novelist or short story writer engage with their assumed audience as they write and leave this story of how one must write in complete isolation behind? …I have some ideas. 😊

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(The obvious idea is to literally not write alone, of course. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but while spouting the lone writer myth in interviews and classes, established novelists often have Acknowledgement sections in their novels that will go on for pages thanking all the people who helped the writer birth their creation into being. Sometimes—oftentimes, I daresay—all this help is backed by a supportive publishing house, with editors and budgets. I’d love to have this kind of support as a writer, but I don’t know what that looks like without a multibillion dollar company behind me. I do have some ruminations on this, but that’s for another essay.)

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To engage with an audience, one needs to define that audience. This is where things start to get weird, because our world has been overrun with branding and content, and defining an audience in marketing-speak means trying to envision who would pay money for access. Which feels as gross to apply to fiction writing as it did to read that sentence. So let’s not do that. Let’s instead think about genre.

In his book (and on his website) The Story Grid, Shawn Coyne talks about the idea of genre. It’s often thought of in the marketing-term sense, where we label a book Romance or Western to get it on the right shelf in the bookstore (or category in Amazon). But Coyne says genre is way more than a marketing term. It’s a promise to the reader to deliver on some obligatory moments (the romantic leads are gonna get together by the end), on some specific elements that make up the genre (that murder mystery is going to have a dead body somewhere), and most importantly, on getting the reader to feel particular feelings as they read the book. Shawn is arguing that you might not realize it, but as a reader when you pick up a certain kind of fiction book you are looking to go on a specific emotional journey. And if the book breaks the genre promise by not evoking the emotions the reader expected to feel vicariously through the main character, readers end up hating said book without knowing exactly why they hated it.

Ok. So if you think about your story as an emotional journey, your audience are the readers who want to come on that journey with you. Demographics might be a help to think about too, if you are writing the book you wish had existed for the younger version of yourself. But I think even then what you are trying to capture is still what it felt like to be X sort of person in X time and place.

Given all this as true, I have a theory. As fiction writers, we are told we must “learn our craft.” But what does that even mean? Is it writing good sentences? Is it developing our authorial voice? Understanding structure? Making setting a character? Finding the protagonist’s internal motivations? Revising? Building suspense? All of these things? None of them? The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education says:

“Craft refers to "the artistic skill or technique with which an author puts together narrative and other elements in order to convey meaning and produce effect" (Massachusetts 2017 English Language Arts and Literacy Framework ).”

Isn’t that helpful! 🙄

What if we chuck all the ideas about “craft”—ideas that are often defined from a very narrow point of view—out the window while writing and keep hold of this one thing: our readers have come to our story to feel some very specific feels, and it is our job as authors to evoke those feelings. What if we kept this responsibility at the top of our minds as we write, making us constantly in dialogue with our assumed readers, instead of mentally alone in an empty room creating for our own egos?

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Seriously, this is all conjecture. I haven’t actually tried to write fiction this way yet, but it’s the only hope I feel like I have since what I’ve been taught isn’t working for me. I am reading Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, and in it she says, “What it has to do is move—end up in a different place from where it started. That’s what narrative does. It goes. It moves. Story is change.” If I focus on bringing my protagonist through an emotional change, then I can answer every question that comes up by re-framing the question to be: What is the best way to make my protagonist feel the way I want them to feel at this point in their emotional journey? Then I don’t have to worry about juggling the separate concepts of setting and plot and motivation and theme and dialogue and character arcs—at least not until much further down the revising road.

In part I have been thinking about this idea because of the realizations I had last week about there being more than one way to tell a story. My stories don’t work with the Hero’s Journey or three-act structure framework because when I try to apply those frameworks, I get stuck. It occurred to me that part of the problem is that I want to describe some of the feels of being a mixed race person interacting in the world, and those feels just aren’t covered inside the Hero’s Journey. Namely, the Hero’s Journey is about the hero learning how to adapt and overcome to resolve the situation they find themselves in. As a mixed race person, the ways in which I don’t fit into a neat, societally-defined box often mean that I am the situation that others need to resolve. There’s just no way to bend that structure to make my characters not the problem.

But since I can obviously write and finish these essays with abandon, I thought, maybe try to take some of what’s working, and see if I can’t apply it onto what’s not. I’ll let you know how it goes as we go!

As always, thank you so much for going on this journey with me, my friends.

💖,

Elnora