Throughout the process of this newsletter, I’ve found the act of writing “for an audience” to be extremely unappealing.
It’s a statement that sounds contradictory. Would writers exist without readers?
I don’t often write with an audience in mind. This was the reason why the “imagined readership” question caused so much internal strife—it implied that writing was a service to others, and if I wasn’t doing that service then it was purely solipsistic.
But the myriad of answers I received from my very small writing community helped reject the need for that dichotomy: I can write to one or a few secret “addressees”; for a past self; for a possible future; for self-transcendence; towards the documentation of a specific time. When I write, it’s to observe, and materialise my psyche into existence. It’s also in service towards the “cloud of unknowing” that Susan Sontag referred to in her collected journals and notes As Consciousness is Harnessed Into Flesh. If someone else ends up taking something away from it, then that’s a bonus.
As a result, this style of publishing didn’t work. Being a slow writer who writes best with the knowledge that no one (that is, in a specific sense) is looking, the weekly turnovers, as well as knowing exactly who was reading and re-reading, resulted in a bit of stress. For me, writing comes with plenty of contemplation and several re-drafts. It also includes the deliberate teasing out of words that has to feel lyrical in a way that’s beyond (my) reproach. It hardly hinges on expectation, unless it’s mine.
And as much as I was reluctant to admit at first, I didn’t gain a lot from the short course either. While it did push me to write outside of my comfort zone, the commercial aspect threw me off. Even if I initially thought I needed to inculcate myself within “the rules” because I’d never been formally trained in writing, I realised that they limited me more than they helped. Like I mentioned in a previous newsletter, some technicalities did end up scratching an itch, but also made me conclude that voice and style can’t be taught, outside of formulaic parroting. Of course, voice isn’t innate, but it definitely comes from copious amounts of reading and thinking.
As someone who dislikes learning in an institution-based setting, learning seems analogous to the many acid trips I’ve had: best solo but unpredictable once exposed to social elements. Too much learning and it becomes dull and/or wacky! In moderation, however, it’s challenging and mind-expanding.
I learnt to write from living in my own head as a child, arguing on messageboards as an adolescent, self-publishing zines as a young adult, and reading, always. Being a person who’s always had trouble articulating with my mouth—even to close friends and lovers—it seemed imperative that I had to find ways to actualise my rapidly-crisscrossing brain in a coherent way.
Being able to escape was a foundational fact. Then came the deep love for a language that, despite its colonial baggage, is the only one I know intimately. And that lightning-bolt feeling of newness that accompanies reading an assembly of words which either taps into what was subliminal, or renders a cliché reshaped. It’s a hunger that almost feels bottomless; the hunger to paint pictures for the sake of your own clarity, like looking into an oracle for answers.
Many tales helped me escape a broken brain and a bad reality. The Babysitters’ Club, the Faraway Tree stories, all of Christopher Pike’s and Stephen King’s horrors, and more—even if most of these worlds didn’t reflect my own. I didn’t ride horses across prairies or live in a dorm rife with gendered socialisation, but so what? They were microcosms I wouldn’t have known otherwise.
Not having a parental library or many friends freed me somewhat. Like I wrote in a 2016 personal essay on my reading journey, it was a self-made algorithm that came together through what was merely there. Feeling the words of authors like V.S. Naipaul, Ursula Le Guin or George Orwell roll around in my mouth evoked a sense of satisfaction that was unparalleled. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin awakened a lucidity that moved me to understand the pseudo-democracy that I lived in.
Later, the grit and earnestness of New Sincerity writers like Dave Eggers and Nicole Krauss would become a huge influence, as well as the underground self-publishing movement that would burgeon alongside that. Al Burian’s Burn Collector showed me a way of writing about place and the self that was simultaneously removed yet viciously intimate. Reading an endless assortment of zines from people all over the world taught me to think critically in a climate that encouraged a stifling conformism which would have surely killed me. Some of these people have gone on to further develop their praxis from their self-published beginnings, but zine-makers like Cindy Crabb, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Alex Wrekk, and Nia King validated that I could be a fucking weirdo but also be comfortable with the fact that that was completely regular.
It’s fine! I could go on. Plenty to distill, and so much more to read. Memory is unreliable and history repeats itself. Through writing I grasp at these—they may be straws, but their subtle tangibility is a comfort.
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As this is the final newsletter, I won’t be recommending anything. But I often post interesting links—both writing and non-writing related, as well as my own published work and hateful thoughts—on Twitter. You can follow me on there if you like.
I’ll be resuming my (irregular) cultural criticism food/book journal Cooking The Books after this. Luckily it’s not a newsletter and contains no metrics! #009 is in progress and will be out within the next couple of weeks.
Thank you for being on this journey with me. Also huge thanks to those who have either subscribed or chucked me $$ on PayPal. As someone who works menial non-arts jobs so that I can survive and continue to create, monetary support like this is crucial at times. It’s pointless to subscribe at this point, but if you feel that this newsletter has been of interest or of benefit to you in some way, do consider tipping me.