What continues to resonate with me is the idea that audiences aren’t just demographics… no, they’re shared psychological landscapes. People recognize themselves in different kinds of stories because they identify with something of their own fears, desires, memories, or questions within them. That’s a perspective I’ll be carrying into my own writing. It doesn’t make me want to broaden my audience nearly as much as it makes me want to understand it more deeply. Thank you for sharing your essay that left me thinking long after I finished reading.
Thank you for such a generous reply… it honestly made my day. And of course, please use it. If that way of looking at audiences helps someone else, I’m happy for it to travel.
Truthfully, that thought wouldn’t have existed without your essay prompting it. Your work gave me a different way of thinking about readers, and that one sentence was simply my attempt to describe what I was seeing because of it. So thank you for the inspiration. I’m looking forward to reading more of your work.
I couldn’t agree more. I think ideas become more useful when they’re shared than when they’re protected. Conversations like this remind me why I enjoy being here.
I always feel like I am in an infomercial, but I seriously have had the best time ever meeting people on Substack. I used to think that all writers were complete assholes.
😂 That made me laugh. Maybe the secret is that Substack rewards conversations more than performances. I’ve met some genuinely thoughtful people here, yourself included.
You’re welcome, and thank you so much! That is a great way to think of it! I will be using that, too, if ya don’t mind.
For almost as long as I have been alive we have thought of literature as nothing deeper than an individual exercise in self expression.
Which, in the writing « community, » has resulted in people using each other as stepping stones rather than inspiration, because we’re all just scrambling up a hill with nothing to connect us but the goal of being Most Important.
Wow. A lot to digest. Gotta start with life is suffering, which I learned from suffering and also that Buddhist class I took that told me so and then I didn't feel so bad about it anymore. Funny how you actually label something real and then it just kinda gets better or more manageable or not as suck ass somehow. Gotta be some psychological term for it that I don't know. Assimilation? Dunno. Tantalus is that guy in Hades who would stoop to drink and the water would recede just out of his lips' reach, and the fruit on the tree would draw back just a bit more than his hand could do to grab it. Love that word tantalize. Nice!
I can't comment on all the specifics accept to say the first paragraph had me actually laughing quite vociferously:
over the question every young writer faces when heshit is deciding whether to accept their shitty life for “material,” or rob a bank so they can have a decent life:
I think I get your all-purpose pronoun fixer contraction for he she it = heshit. That's fucking funny, but the delivery of that sentence about shitty life and robbing a bank is comedy gold.
It's also cathartic in its way. Which I think may be one answer to the question the whole essay is agonizing over, and a solution maybe. This kind of writing can cater to high and low in my opinion. Been seeing some youtube vids on the return of pulp. KDP has actually a new "pulp" paper option for their paperbacks. Could be this is an invitation to try and pump out some page turners that could even appeal to those long suffering elites and trustafundians by pure happenstance and accident. Cut the old universallly agreed upon 60 K word count counting as one novel in half, make it 30 and fashion yourself another HP Lovecraft or Raymond Chandler.
When you do, I'll be your editor so that we can write like this:
And get dumber, because we are all affected by the swamp ecosystem that is swallowing us.
And get dumber, cuz we're all affected by the swamp ecosystem that's digesting us slowly like that cavern of doom that looks like a vagina in Star Wars' Return of the Jedi.
Bahahahah how did I not notice it looks like a vagina?!
I guess I was 12?
I’m writing me some pulp right now and I tell you what, it is way harder to write good pulp fiction than litfic fiction. I mean it’s easy to write bad pulp but what’s the point? Litfic is just point and shoot.
Funny thing is, the less you identify with your meat sack, the more pleasant your suffering becomes… I mean, if it hurts bad enough then it just sucks, but when I had typhus I was in so much pain for a while that I stopped being able to feel it. I told myself, you’re being greedy, the basket is empty, there is no more suffering.
I love my neopronoun heshit. I am really kind of proud of it.
As well you should be, it's a profound answer to one of the stupidest questions ever axed. I love it. Anyhow. Are you really turning to the page turner genre? I always subscribed to entertain first and hope that some of the deep knowledge I'm hoping to impart just kinda is imbued throughout the story and get taken up by the reader...or doesn't.
Yes. Every writer knew the best kind of story is born from suffering
What continues to resonate with me is the idea that audiences aren’t just demographics… no, they’re shared psychological landscapes. People recognize themselves in different kinds of stories because they identify with something of their own fears, desires, memories, or questions within them. That’s a perspective I’ll be carrying into my own writing. It doesn’t make me want to broaden my audience nearly as much as it makes me want to understand it more deeply. Thank you for sharing your essay that left me thinking long after I finished reading.
Thank you for such a generous reply… it honestly made my day. And of course, please use it. If that way of looking at audiences helps someone else, I’m happy for it to travel.
Truthfully, that thought wouldn’t have existed without your essay prompting it. Your work gave me a different way of thinking about readers, and that one sentence was simply my attempt to describe what I was seeing because of it. So thank you for the inspiration. I’m looking forward to reading more of your work.
Thank you, sir! And you’re very welcome.
I think this is how people thinking together is supposed to work.
I couldn’t agree more. I think ideas become more useful when they’re shared than when they’re protected. Conversations like this remind me why I enjoy being here.
I always feel like I am in an infomercial, but I seriously have had the best time ever meeting people on Substack. I used to think that all writers were complete assholes.
Nah, just me and the people I happened to know.
😂 That made me laugh. Maybe the secret is that Substack rewards conversations more than performances. I’ve met some genuinely thoughtful people here, yourself included.
Heheh delighted.
You’re welcome, and thank you so much! That is a great way to think of it! I will be using that, too, if ya don’t mind.
For almost as long as I have been alive we have thought of literature as nothing deeper than an individual exercise in self expression.
Which, in the writing « community, » has resulted in people using each other as stepping stones rather than inspiration, because we’re all just scrambling up a hill with nothing to connect us but the goal of being Most Important.
Do all roads lead to solipsism?
Eventually
Depends on where you start, I guess
At least we're hot sufferers.
Hot sufferers, that sounds like a band name from 1974
Wow. A lot to digest. Gotta start with life is suffering, which I learned from suffering and also that Buddhist class I took that told me so and then I didn't feel so bad about it anymore. Funny how you actually label something real and then it just kinda gets better or more manageable or not as suck ass somehow. Gotta be some psychological term for it that I don't know. Assimilation? Dunno. Tantalus is that guy in Hades who would stoop to drink and the water would recede just out of his lips' reach, and the fruit on the tree would draw back just a bit more than his hand could do to grab it. Love that word tantalize. Nice!
I can't comment on all the specifics accept to say the first paragraph had me actually laughing quite vociferously:
over the question every young writer faces when heshit is deciding whether to accept their shitty life for “material,” or rob a bank so they can have a decent life:
I think I get your all-purpose pronoun fixer contraction for he she it = heshit. That's fucking funny, but the delivery of that sentence about shitty life and robbing a bank is comedy gold.
It's also cathartic in its way. Which I think may be one answer to the question the whole essay is agonizing over, and a solution maybe. This kind of writing can cater to high and low in my opinion. Been seeing some youtube vids on the return of pulp. KDP has actually a new "pulp" paper option for their paperbacks. Could be this is an invitation to try and pump out some page turners that could even appeal to those long suffering elites and trustafundians by pure happenstance and accident. Cut the old universallly agreed upon 60 K word count counting as one novel in half, make it 30 and fashion yourself another HP Lovecraft or Raymond Chandler.
When you do, I'll be your editor so that we can write like this:
And get dumber, because we are all affected by the swamp ecosystem that is swallowing us.
And get dumber, cuz we're all affected by the swamp ecosystem that's digesting us slowly like that cavern of doom that looks like a vagina in Star Wars' Return of the Jedi.
Bahahahah how did I not notice it looks like a vagina?!
I guess I was 12?
I’m writing me some pulp right now and I tell you what, it is way harder to write good pulp fiction than litfic fiction. I mean it’s easy to write bad pulp but what’s the point? Litfic is just point and shoot.
Funny thing is, the less you identify with your meat sack, the more pleasant your suffering becomes… I mean, if it hurts bad enough then it just sucks, but when I had typhus I was in so much pain for a while that I stopped being able to feel it. I told myself, you’re being greedy, the basket is empty, there is no more suffering.
I love my neopronoun heshit. I am really kind of proud of it.
As well you should be, it's a profound answer to one of the stupidest questions ever axed. I love it. Anyhow. Are you really turning to the page turner genre? I always subscribed to entertain first and hope that some of the deep knowledge I'm hoping to impart just kinda is imbued throughout the story and get taken up by the reader...or doesn't.
(Heheheh “if you’re gonna ask me a dumb question, you’re gonna get a MEGADUMB answer!”)
Heheheh.
Yep, yep I am!
That’s the right attitude.
Trying too hard gives you Snow White.