Give Unto Others: Or Perhaps Not

            Should a writer provide "what readers want?"

        Human relationships are tricky things. Romance, for example, is fraught with misunderstanding and incompatible desires. Most humans expect to meet a “right person” to love or marry, yet must learn how to recognize so elusive a being and to develop healthy patterns of mutual interaction.

            I myself am seeking to better understand my authorial relationship with readers.

            I receive conflicting advice. Writers must choose an audience and write for it specifically! No, writers should simply write what they wish to read themselves. Writers will make no money if they do not respond to market demand. No, writers will never be worth reading if they do not find their own unique voice and hope that others wish to listen to it.

            In his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie instructs his readers to consider others’ wants and desires. He says to frame the presentation of one’s own request in a way that persuades people that they will get what they want if they do what one asks. This applies to writing. If I want other people to read my fiction, I must offer them something desirable, even if only the relief of suspense I have created. I cannot expect anyone to seek out my work if they are disappointed and displeased with the endings I provide. Yet stories which give readers exactly what they want (and expect) are transient and forgettable. In the end, we remember the book in which the boy’s dog dies, the hero is changed beyond repair, or the devastating betrayal is unexpected. Yet even these endings (although not what the reader wants) must satisfy the audience.

            How does one achieve this? In one of my writing groups, the members clamored for the protagonist of my story to act in a way that was completely contrary to the idea of the entire piece. Their feelings demonstrate that my story is not yet successful. Somehow, I must discover a way to persuade my readers to want what I want them to want, and to ultimately accept my answer. For this to happen, my ending must seem to flow naturally from the events that precede it, and (if it is a particularly hard sell) events must be arranged so that the audience feels it to be better, or truer, than the alternatives.

            Oddly enough, it is currently easier to set up a story so that the audience will want the protagonist to do a “bad thing” than a “right thing.” We are all familiar with the mechanics that are used to persuade us that we want the hero to illegally kill the villain. Less comfortable, less satisfying, and less salable is a story in which the hero nobly sacrifices his desires instead of his enemy. This is the true challenge. This is an opportunity to subvert readers’ expectations and provide something genuinely unexpected. I find it an attractively difficult goal and have been pondering it at length. How can a writer do this? I am still working on it. 

Review: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

by Julia Strachey
Hogarth Press, 1932 and Persephone Books, 2009

As she prepares for her marriage ceremony, young Dolly Thatcham swigs rum out of a bottle in her bedroom and wonders what is awry with her life. The reader sees a simple answer to Dolly’s question, yet Dolly herself is unable and unwilling to acknowledge it (or perhaps she does not know what she would do if she did). The heart is complicated and other human beings bewildering. There is no simple answer in life. Yet at the same time there is, and we all see it, but we do not do anything about it.

Originally published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s small press, this bleak novella is written with delicate intensity. The narration (confined to an afternoon at a single home) communicates a great deal that it does not say. The colors, furnishings, and lighting convey a tangible mood. Occasionally the surroundings are described in ways that cannot be literally true (such as one woman’s “orange eyes,”) yet the reader feels that in some way they are true nonetheless. Strachey’s ability to evoke is lovely.

The novella suggests that fundamental honesty from and between people is absent from life, or at least from the middle-class, conventional life of the author’s day, and that this is why life is a weary tragedy. While her belief itself is not unique, she manages to convey it with few words and little plot, and without anything outwardly unpleasant happening to the characters. Their mistakes are self-chosen, and even though they are forward-thinking young people who mock the conventions, that does not save them from a lack of understanding about their own desires.

Julia Strachey (described by Woolf as a “gifted wastrel”) lived a lifestyle reminiscent of Dorothy’s Sayer’s portrayal of Bohemia, but with sadder undertones. No doubt she attempted to pursue fundamental honesty in her own abandonment of middle-class moral and social conventions. The forward to the new edition of her novel, written by her friend and biographer, describes the ending that accompanied the marital aspect of this attempt:

“She was very happy indeed with Lawrence Gowing [her second husband, who was seventeen years younger than she was] during the next thirty years, for fifteen of which they were married. They roared with laughter at each other’s jokes and he looked after her devotedly. From 1962 onwards, after Lawrence fell in love with a very charming and attractive girl…they tried for a while to live as a threesome. But sadly, after Lawrence and his new wife had children, this was no longer possible, even though Jenny Gowing was very kind I think and behaved in a very civilized way, and Julia grew more and more lonely.”

  

Is Strachey’s bleak sketch of “conventional life” accurate? In a sense, it is—dependence on human beings to successfully and independently find absolute Truth and live with complete Honesty leads to disappointment. Yet Strachey does not paint a complete picture, because she focuses only on the inadequacy inside her characters and does not include any character who lives for something bigger than him or herself. Even the love that the protagonists feel (or may have felt) does not extend to compassion for each other—it is entirely about each person’s inner experience. Dolly does not seem to believe in the platitudes and social constructs of her world, yet neither does she find any other system of thought that she is willing to act on. Her story would have been very different if she had believed in something.

Note: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was made into a movie that came out in New Zealand this year. Judging by the movie synopsis on IMDB.com, I suspect the story has been changed significantly to translate it to film.

Special Announcement: Read My Piece in the January Issue of 713 Flash Fiction

The Hum of Refuge is a piece of flash fiction that I wrote last month in response to the contest prompt, “And you think razor wire will keep me out?” It won through to publication! Read it online at Kazka Press , and feel free to leave me comments here. Does anyone recognize the setting?