Our usual haunt had stopped their food service for the day, and Marisa was hungry.
“Let’s go to Macca’s,” she suggested. “Are you hungry?”
I’d been munching on plain Coles-brand croissants in between house-cleaning jobs to keep my energy levels up and my bank account as unchanged as possible. Was I hungry? I had no idea. On days like these, the sheer amount of energy necessary to maintain an adequate amount of functionality meant that I was too disassociated to understand how my body was actually feeling. I shook my head.
“No, let me buy you something!”
I looked around to make sure the mop I was holding wasn’t accidentally poking anyone around me. Shrugging, I sighed, “Sure. If you insist. I’ll have a fish burger.”
Marisa looked sharply at me. I felt like a lost, needy child. Despite our very small age difference, she had a knack for bringing out my repressed mummy issues with even the smallest gestures of care. A very self-sufficient bitch, but I’m not an island!
As we sat down, we talked about how this could possibly be the last time we would meet up as mentor and mentee, at least on an official level. The hours that were allocated between us by Writers Victoria had already been generously stretched to its limit, and I didn’t have any more grant money to pay her.
“What else do you need from me?”
It was a long think, even without the fog of fatigue floating over me. I reiterated to Marisa how valuable the entire mentorship experience had been for me—it had helped me understand my practice a lot better, which had opened up a new door for me to clearly see the next tiny stage in my writing trajectory. Things I had not been schooled in or were frustrated about were now less tangled.
The only thing that was still bothering me however, was the question of an “imagined readership”. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know that it was something my course teacher had pointedly asked me in Class 2.
“Who is it?” I wailed hopelessly. “When I write, I don’t really think of an audience. Do you have one?”
Up till now, no question had fazed Marisa and this one didn’t either. She was unconcerned that this was something I was struggling with, simply because she knew the digital writing landscape worked on a distinctly different level than if I was writing for a newspaper, or if I was straight-up working on a book.
“Readership varies according to the publication, especially when it comes to online writing,” she explained. “When you read certain publications religiously, you don’t consciously think about the audience but you absorb its style and end up writing for the publication’s demographic anyway.”
The statement—stated so drily in a way that was very Marisa-esque—jolted me out of my exhausted stupor. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I’d been reading publications like Granta, n+1, The Atlantic and London Review of Books routinely for a large-ish chunk of my adulthood. Even though I hadn’t been published in those places, other journals I’d written for or had been pitching to either fell in line with or aspired to those norms.
But Marisa could ascertain all of that. It was simply a fact, not a moral code I’d flouted.
“When you write for largely white literary publications you subconsciously end up writing for a white middle-class audience because that’s the prevailing expectation.”
I had to reluctantly agree. So much for subverting the Institution! I could feel my thoughts swirling in its usual ouroboric manner. The comparison was stark: the pieces I’d pitched versus the ones I goallessly wrote then tried to place were quite different. I could start to—albeit dimly—glimpse what my desired readership was.
“Who’s yours?” I asked again, curiously. “Especially for the book in progress?”
“Sri Lankan LGBTQIA folk and then those outside of that demographic who are open to learning more about queerness,” she responded, without pause.
“OK. I guess mine would be people who exist in multiple liminal spaces like me? To manifest my existence through writing and then hopefully offer that same solidarity to like-minded folk?” I ventured, still a little unsure.
Marisa nodded. As usual, she knew where the conversation was going, like she’d had it multiple times with multiple mentees. She briefly summarised post-colonial literature (“what you’re implying is heavily a feature!”) and said that my writing probably slotted in there somewhere, even if I didn’t know it. It made sense, considering how I’d been drawn to that sort of philosophy and writing (Jenny Zhang, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamau Braithwaite, Spivak, Fanon, et al) more than others.
“I suppose I can say now that my very… unadulterated writing is for… other post-colonial… globalised dystopian selves?” It felt good to zero in so deeply, which made me briefly think about what an artist I admired had said off-handedly the previous weekend—“I don’t make art broadly, not anymore.”
“No. Post-colonial globalised culturally disconnected dystopian self!” Marisa corrected, laughing. “Put that in your bio.”
I laughed along. “Stop pigeonholing me!”
Five days prior, I had attended the penultimate class of the course. The atmosphere was languid, with more conspicuous absentees. By now, it was pretty evident that the course content was more interesting to some than others.
Class number 5 was largely about research. Our teacher emphasised its importance—“even if you’re writing a memoir based largely on your own life.” That seemed like a revelation to a few people. Already well-aware of my tendency to be a smart-ass, I kept my expression unmoving.
We discussed interviewing techniques. Closed questions (those which would only require someone to answer “yes”, “no” or “I don’t know”) were considered terrible, and leading questions (those which insinuated a hard viewpoint) were usually bad, but not always. If you’re able to read your interviewee and ask them a question which would steer them into telling you something they wouldn’t usually, then it was fair to be a little bit more provocative. The worst types of questions, in our teacher’s opinion, were double-barrelled questions (those which focused on more than one subject at once) and pseudo-questions, a.k.a. “statements masquerading as questions”. The best questions were “green light questions”, which would encourage the interviewee to provide more expansive responses.
“Think of how you would start a conversation with someone you don’t know well,” she mused.
I’d done interviews—both online and in person—before, but it was nice to recap these basics. At least the Institution was validating what I was already doing.
Emma raised her hand. “What if it all goes horribly wrong though?”
“Don’t be afraid to stop and start again. It pays to listen carefully to your interviewee’s answers because anything can happen,” our teacher replied, smiling broadly like she’d prophesised this scenario in her dream and it was finally happening.
“Yeah. I’d done this before. Sometimes you get so caught up in a certain direction you think more about speeding through the interview instead of actually trying to grasp what’s at hand,” I volunteered.
Anthropologist Dude looked thoughtfully at me. I mean, I’d probably never see these people again. Why was I so bothered as to how I’d be perceived? Was it because they were middlebrow and Institution-leaning, i.e. the white mainstream I’d subconsciously engaged with my entire life? Or was it because if I admitted to myself that this course wasn’t doing as much as I expected it’d do for me, I’d appear to be an ungrateful grant recipient?
Of course, there was no time for Existentialism 101. Our teacher agreed, still smiling. Everything was going according to plan! She referred us to Kelly Gardiner’s Research Tools Every Writer Needs, then wrote these points on the whiteboard:
Why exactly am I interested in telling the story?
Why am I telling it now?
Why would anyone else be interested or care?
How might this affect my readers? What emotions do I want to stimulate?
To whom am I telling this story to, and what can I assume they already know or don’t know?
What details would a reader need to understand the story?
Are there any particular memorable anecdotes, facts or vivid images I need to get from my interviewee?
How can I help my interviewee tell their story simply, so that my readers will not fail to understand?
Have they told their story in accessible language?
Have they told me something unexpected?
These were questions that were usually considered within a piece, but were also valuable towards both interviewing and research. Copious reading is but only one aspect of writing; engaging on an interpersonal level opens up many more ways of looking that subtly enhances a work.
Once again, this class had sped towards its end without anyone realising. The last class was going to be about book publishing proposals, but our teacher implored us to email her if there was anything particular we wanted her to cover. She was going to bring her homemade sugarless gluten-free banana bread.
***
This week’s recommendations:
This one by Maria Popova on how writers can do constructive criticism—“But what E. B. White once wisely pointed to as the role and social responsibility of the writer—"to lift people up, not lower them down"—I believe to be true of the role and social responsibility of the critic as well, for thoughtful criticism is itself an art and a creative act.”
This conversation between Hanif Abdurraqib and Marwa Helal in The Lifted Brow #39—“And I am perhaps done suffering for the creation of my work. I’m committed to that now.”
Jillian Weise’s stunning piece on the disabled self as cyborg—“They would never consider cyborg those of us with pacemakers or on dialysis, those of us kept alive by machines or made ambulatory by wheelchairs, those of us on biologics or anti-depressants. They want us shiny and metallic and in their image.”
This review/interview between Tony Messenger and Melody Paloma in Mascara Literary Review—”I think in order to make a reader experience discomfort in a way that encourages interrogation you have to experience that first-hand through the practice of writing itself, otherwise it dissolves into virtue signalling.”
William Scates Frances’ very generously-shared public Google Doc Minimanual to Essay Writing (it’s mostly for academic writing, but has some good advice)