Whose Voice?

I’m thinking about my audience too much. I recall my school-age writing classes – always the advice, Think of your audience. Who is reading this? I gave the same advice during my own brief career as a high school English teacher. I suppose it’s good advice to give narcissistic young people when they've been assigned to write an essay for parents about how to operate an iPod.  Know your audience. The audience dictates how you write.  But I longed to throw out the old advice, including the five-paragraph formula: tell what you’re going to say, say it in three paragraphs, and then tell us what you just said. I spent that year remembering that I wanted to write, not pass on “lame” advice to disinterested students. I no longer believed the advice. That’s one reason I’m not an English teacher any more.

In my original career as a journalist, I was instructed to write for an audience of adults with the average intelligence of a 13-year-old. That was a long time ago, so maybe the advice has changed by now. I was to write on that level -- so, for example, if I were to mention Hemingway, I would write, "Twentieth-century American author, Ernest Hemingway . . . "

Later, I spent a few years at the CDC editing articles for medical journals.  The doctors who wrote these laborious tomes told me their readers would already know what they were talking about. There was no need to define laparoscopic salpingectomy, I learned.

Public relations writing is the hardest work of all -- feigning urgent excitement in order to peddle treetop resort homes to an audience of bored retirees, convincing them that the fountain of youth is at Big Canoe!

I’m discovering that, for the first time in my life, it's time to stop thinking about the audience. First of all, I don’t know who my audience is. Some days it occurs to me that my audience might be my own children many years from now – that is, if they don’t throw away the manuscript along with my worn slippers and unfinished knitting projects. Maybe I’ll have a curious, like-minded grandchild who actually longs to know who his or her grandmother was – maybe he or she will publish my book!

Some people will get it; some won’t. That’s why I like the picture I’ve included at the left. The young girl in the center with the blue skirt and pinkish sweater – that’s the one I fear most of all. She’s humiliated for me, worried, shrinking inside herself on my account. Maybe the writer in me is about her age, and she can't believe the things I'm saying about us.  The two girls next to her are dumbfounded and bored. I saw those faces every day when I was teaching. The guys don’t matter. Who are those women in the front? 

I think I have to write this for myself right now. That's what real writers who give advice about writing would say.  They say, write what you know.  Be yourself.  Write the thing that comes out of you.  Find your voice!  Find your voice! Later . . . if that doesn't work . . . I'll figure it out when we get there, Little Girl.