THE IMPORTANCE OF AN INTIMATE
AUDIENCE FOR YOUR STORIES
January 1989
A few hours after I finish writing this, my wife, Lynne, will read it.
It doesn’t always take a few hours. In the ordinary course of things, I’ll type The End at the bottom of the last page, put the pages in order, give the thing a cursory proofreading, change a good word to a better one and carry the manuscript to wherever she is. (If we’re staying someplace with a washing machine, that’s where she can generally be found, feeding socks to the monster.)
“I just finished my column,” I’ll say. “Wanna read it?”
“Sure,” she’ll say. Then she’ll drop everything (especially socks) and read it, and she’ll assure me that it’s terrific, and I’ll photocopy the thing and ship it off to Cincinnati, where Bill Brohaugh may or may not agree with her.
In the current instance the column will have to wait a few hours before Lynne reads it, and I’ll have to wait a few hours more to be assured that it’s terrific. That’s because it’s midnight as I write these lines, and Lynne has quite sensibly gone to sleep. I have no less sensibly gone to work, and shall most likely finish up shortly before dawn, when they say it’s always darkest. I’ll go to sleep, and a while later she’ll get up and read what I’ve written, and a few hours after that I’ll get up and be reassured that I haven’t lost my touch, that I can still turn out a column with the best of them and that the world is a better place for my presence in it.
Months later, you’ll read all this. And right about now you’ll very likely be wondering why I’m telling you all this. “He probably wrote this in the dog days of August,” you’ll say to yourself, “and the heat must have addled him. How could his wife tell him it was terrific? I mean, what’s the point?”
The point, I guess, is that the task of writing this column is not truly complete until Lynne has read it and pronounced it satisfactory. (Oh, in a sense it’s not complete even then. The columnization process continues through its submission, through receiving galleys and returning them with corrections, through receiving my check, through seeing the magazine in print and reading letters from grateful or irate readers. But the writing part of the process ends when Lynne reads it.)
Why?
Beats me. I don’t suppose I’m any more insecure than the next garden-variety neurotic. I don’t sit around trembling until she pronounces my work fit for human consumption. I’ll go to bed as soon as I finish this, and concern about her reaction won’t keep me awake. As a matter of fact, I don’t really need to be concerned about her reaction. Nothing’s all that certain in this vale of tears, but I can be reasonably confident that she’ll tell me it’s a good column. She always does. She may like some of my columns more than others, but her reaction to each of them is invariably positive.
In any event, what does her opinion of the work signify? Unlike the good Mr. Brohaugh, she’s not in a position to say yea or nay to the piece. And, unlike you, Gentle Reader, she has no particular interest in the technical problems of the fictioneer; she has sufficient problems, I have no doubt, in living with one.
This is not to say that she never offers any advice. Sometimes she spots a typo that I’ve missed. Sometimes she’ll notice that I’ve repeated a word or phrase. Sometimes she’ll call my attention to an infelicitous turn of phrase or an ambiguous construction. This is helpful, no question, but it’s not why I make such a point of having her read it.
Her reading it completes the writing process. Until she reads it, it hasn’t really been written.
She’s the fourth wall.
The fourth wall.
That’s what theater people call the audience; without its presence, the performance is not framed and is consequently incomplete. A piece of fiction (or, in the present example, a magazine column) is similarly incomplete without an audience; like Bishop Berkeley’s tree, if it falls unheard, does it even make a sound?
All art is communication, but in none is communication more inherent than in writing. I’ve discussed this before, in pondering the paramount importance most writers attach to publication. Even those of us for whom writing is very clearly a hobby, a leisure pursuit, are quite single-minded about wanting to see our words in print. If they are not in print, how are they to be read? And, if they are not read, have they truly been written? Do they make a sound? Or do they fall unheard?
All of this came into focus for me a week ago when Lynne and I visited Barbara and Max Collins in Muscatine, Iowa. Al writes the Dick Tracy comic strip, along with a prodigious amount of high-quality crime fiction, including a wonderful series of period novels about one Nathan Heller. He works nights, and every morning Barb reads what he’s written the night before. She tells him what she thinks of what he’s done, and they discuss it, and then he goes on.
As Al explains it, Barb a sort of collaborator. He has learned over the years to value her input and rework passages and chapters on the basis of her reactions. While he may not always regard her response as the final word, he never takes it lightly.
I couldn’t do this. For one thing, I’m too damned pig-headed; when I’ve managed to get something on paper, the last thing I want is someone telling me how to fix it. To have someone offer suggestions on a work in progress would drive me around the bend.
More to the point, I wouldn’t want Lynne (or anyone else) to read chapters of a novel I hadn’t yet finished even if she said nothing whatsoever about them. As compulsive as I am about getting her to read my stuff as soon as it’s finished, I’m at least as compulsive about keeping her from reading work in progress.
I’m not sure just why this is so. Perhaps I don’t want anyone else’s mind groping the material until I’ve finished shaping it. Maybe I’m afraid I won’t be able to finish the thing, and I’ll be less embarrassed if I haven’t already shown some of it to someone. Whatever the underlying reason, for years now I’ve avoided showing work in progress, and the whole idea of someone reading chapters of an unfinished work gives me the willies.
Some years ago, on two or three occasions I showed chunks of unfinished novels to my agent. In each instance I had gotten stuck on the book and wanted his opinion. Each time he pointed out several serious problems in the work in question and expressed reservations about the project. Each time I sighed, thanked him, nodded thoughtfully, and abandoned the work.
A while later I realized what was going on. I was showing him work in progress only when it was quite emphatically work that had ceased to be in progress, and when I was looking for an excuse to put it in a trunk and slam the lid on it. My agent was cast in the role of Mikey in the cereal commercial. I showed it to him, secure in the foreknowledge that he would hate it, and his negative reaction would absolve me of the need to do any more work on it.
Ever since the penny dropped I’ve ceased to show him anything until it’s finished. He’s still apt to dislike it, but by then it’s too late.
Once I’ve finished a piece of fiction, I can’t wait until it’s read.
Lynne is my first reader. When I finished Random Walk, I literally could not wait until she read it. I wrote the book at a writers’ colony in Virginia, and I drove all the way back to South Florida nonstop. That’s around 900 miles, and you have to be a little bit nuts to drive it in one stretch, and I was. I didn’t just want her to read the book—I missed the woman, for heaven’s sake—but I couldn’t wait until she read it.
Fart of the intensity of my desire can be attributed to insecurity. The book was a departure for me, and I wanted to be assured that it worked. I knew, too, that she was more likely than anyone I could think of to respond favorably to this particular book; if she didn’t like it, I was in trouble.
More than that, I wanted to share the book with her, and to share myself through it. In the deepest sense, everything I write is written in an effort to let people know who and what and where I am. The more important people are to me, the more urgently I want them to become acquainted with those aspects of myself that my work reflects.
Now that I think about it, I showed Random Walk to more than the usual number of people. Two of my daughters read it, and my son-in-law, and my mother, and three writer friends. I don’t know whether I was moved to show it to so many people out of a greater than usual insecurity and the concomitant desire for reassurance, or because I was working deeper veins of self in this book and felt especially moved to show what I’d unearthed.
A little of both, probably.
I haven’t conducted a survey, but it seems to me that most writers show their work to one or more people before trotting it off to market.
Even for those for whom the reaction of a particular agent or editor is of the greatest critical importance, a spouse or friend or lover will commonly serve as a first reader. Most of us have some sort of fourth wall, and most of us have learned to compose that wall of persons who can be expected to look with favor upon what we’ve produced. Not blindly, not sycophantically, not uncritically—but, yes, favorably.
It’s different, of course, when we sense that something’s wrong and genuinely need to be told what it is. That’s the time when we have to seek out someone on whose critical acumen and integrity we can rely. In ordinary circumstances, however, we want to be told that what we’ve done is marvelous. Since we don’t want to be lied to, we take pains to pick readers likely to love what we’ve written.
I suspect this kind of fourth wall is at least as important to the unestablished writer. When everything you write is coming back from publishers by return mail, it may be cold comfort to know that your husband thought the description of the desert was right on target, that your girlfriend cried during the death scene, that your sister couldn’t put the book down until she’d read the last page. None of these readers has the authority in your eyes of an agent or an editor. They can’t offer you a contract or write you a check.
But they can make you aware that you are writing, and that your writing is communicating, that you are indeed being read. They can even make you feel better.
And that’s not bad.