It takes a village to raise a child, and, judging from acknowledgement pages and how my writing group has saved my ass innumerable times, it takes a village to write a book. In addition to the obvious participants (your writing teachers and colleagues, your beta readers, your agent or publisher or local copy store clerk), we’re dependent on supportive partners, babysitters, the barista fueling our endeavors, the friends willing have us bounce ideas off of them or loan us their cabins. Not to mention the developers of word processing programs and workers in paper factories and those who make machines to squirt ink in our pens.
But wait! What about the host of internal voices contributing to your creation? Your seventh grade English teacher who thought you were a great poet, your grandmother who was your biggest fan, your best friend who kept you company while you scrawled lines during lunch? What about the authors of the books you devoured, who showed you how stories transport and stretch and fuel their readers? For that matter, consider the people who fostered your courage and imagination, your reflective capacities, your resilience and patience—qualities without which your writing life wouldn’t exist. Most of what makes you you comes from your village. Each one of those people contribute to what emerges from your pen.
Actually, “village” may be an underestimate. If we throw in any audiences, real and imagined, dead, alive, and unborn, who populate our writing life, we need a city. So much of writing is conversation, with various parts of ourselves (my current self in dialogue with my younger self or my better self conversing with my worst self, for instance) or with broader cultural movements, or with readers. Except that, until our pages land in a reader’s hands, that reader is entirely conceptual. We anticipate their questions. We play to their tastes. Before our work ever meets flesh-and-blood readers, they’ve participated in our composition.
The word “person” comes from the Latin verb per-sonare, literally “sounding through.” Hundreds if not thousands of people “sound through” us every time we put pen to page. Isn’t this marvelous?! Writing is how the vast chorus around and inside of us is able to sing.
—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew
Photo by László D. on Unsplash
If you’re interested in learning more about this broader understanding of audience, please check out my latest craft book, The Release.