Audience...

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Hamlet, Act III, scene iii, lines 100-103

(Quick little note: posts and musings about Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird will start later in the week.)

I have a little issue with all of this online posting that we do. It’s fun – to see our own creations online, to see what others think about them, to see what others have created and then to have the chance to respond to them. But, here’s the deal. I also see people who are great scrappers, in my humble opinion, post about how nervous they are to journal because they’re afraid that it will sound silly, childish, whatever.

Let’s unpack this for a minute. Who are we afraid of sounding “silly” to? The kids whose pages we’re creating? These, after all, are the creatures whose butts and noses we’ve wiped, and who aren’t at all afraid (if they’re like mine) of mooning their parents with the living room shades wide open. The sister who at the age of 80 picks up your scrapbook because she desperately misses you?

I think we’re afraid of sounding silly or goofy or childish to the wrong audience. And so I want to talk about audience a bit.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a scrapper who spends a bit of time online. (Or a lot of time online. But I’m not pointing any fingers here.) You probably post your layouts, cards, and/or altered items on any of the hundreds of online galleries that are out there, you may have your own blog, you might be on a design team or be interested in being on one, and you might even be interested in publishing your work.

So, who is your audience?

In most of the publications about journaling that come close to talking about “audience” as a writerly term, we always assume that our “audience” has something to do with heritage… that we’re creating what we create for our kids, for our family, for us to look back on or be remembered through… Simple enough. My simple answer to the question, “Who do you scrap for?” would be, just as simply, “My kids.”

But I don’t think it’s that simple. If I’m creating a layout for an online forum’s challenge, it has to be in my head as I’m working on it, even if I’m thinking at the same time that it’s going into my son’s “Age 9” scrapbook. If I’m scrapping that way, my audience is NOT just my son. It’s everyone that I can imagine reading the journaling, from the owner of the site, to the DT, to regular members, to the many surfers and lurkers who browse through galleries where we’re not members.

Now, I’m not saying that’s bad. But I do want to point out the disparity in who we SAY we’re scrapping for, and who we’re really scrapping for.

No matter what kind of product that a writer produces, whether it’s a cookbook, a short story, a play,… one of the first questions that that writer tackles is, “Who is your intended audience?”

Note that word there. Intended. Who do you want to read your work? Who are you pointing it toward? Who do you imagine sitting at the other end of the creative process, reading what you’ve produced?

I think that as scrappers who have an online audience, we have to do some hard thinking about this audience question. Be honest. Are we really journaling for ourselves, our kids, or whomever we imagine reading this creation fifty years from now? Or, when we say that we’re nervous about journaling, afraid of sounding silly or stupid, are we really saying that we’re writing more for our peers online than for those who are going to care about what’s there on the page fifty years from now?

Exeunt, pursued by bear.

Didja get the book?

Just checking in. I'll do a real update later today or sometime on Monday, with some thoughts about audience. But I wanted to check in and remind y'all to look for Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. Grab a used copy from an online seller or a local bookstore. If you're in a university town, I'd lay odds that you can find it at a larger used bookstore near campus, too. And most large book retailers would either have copies on hand or could easily order them.

A word of caution: if you're buying online, make sure that you're buying the book and not the documentary film made about Anne Lamott. They have similar titles.

Exeunt (for a short time) pursued by bear.

birds

I have some extra time during the summers – or at least I have more flexible time. So it’s often the time that I try to catch up on “fun” reading. For me, fun reading includes anything that I don’t have to prepare to teach, whether it be a novel that I’m dying to sink my teeth into (like James Patterson’s latest installment in the Women’s Murder Club series) or some recent scholarship in my field that I haven’t had time to read. As I scanned my bookshelves the other day, I saw a book that I’ve had a love affair with for a long time.

A few years ago, I took a teaching job that required me to teach, among other things, a general education course that would have a heavy emphasis on writing. I’m not a stranger to thinking about writing or even to thinking about teaching about writing… I started graduate school in an English program, taking courses in rhetoric and writing studies. But I switched fields before I had to actually teach a writing class. So, in my anxiety about having to actually teach units on writing or devise assignments that would help students develop their writing skills, I asked a writer friend for some recommendations. Her first suggestion was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Lamott wrote the book as a reflection on the art of writing, from the perspective of a published writer who now has to teach students the skills they need to become “good” writers, if not published writers. Toward the end of the book, she riffs on what passes through her mind on the last day of class, what she would really want to leave her class with:

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about being sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.

OK, so “subversive” might sound a little scary. It’s hard to think about a scrapbook page being subversive, I suppose. But the heart of Lamott’s observations relate pretty directly to how we journal or why we journal. Writing from a place of insight, of simplicity, of “real caring about the truth.” She points exactly to how I hope I can learn to write. I’m not there yet.

So, I have a little suggestion, and I’m curious to see how many of you might be on board with me. I’d like to put Bird by Bird back on my summer reading list. And I’d like to pull some sections out to refer to here in my blog, to draw connections to how we journal and why we journal on these creations of ours. In case you want to read along, I checked the amazon.com prices … you can get it used for as little as $4 or new for a little over $11, and it’s pretty easy to locate new copies in brick & mortar stores. And really, it’s a great read, full of her own insights about how she has lived her life – or how she hasn’t lived it, for that matter -- as a mother, daughter, friend. I’d advocate for putting it on a summer reading list even without the journaling challenge.

So let me know what you think. Are you on board, want to ride along?

Coming next week -- talking about audience. How do you decide who you're journaling for or to?

An added note: Check out the challenge forum at Creative Scrap Shack, where DT member Terrie McCoy Pieper has begun posting journaling challenges!