Writing With an Audience in Mind

Contemplation on Sara’s Review

In the perpetual informational world that is social media I came across a recent review of a book I wrote a few years ago, a novel which portrays a young man trying to hold on to his dream of playing in the National Football League. Her comments lifted my spirit not because she showered me with accolades (she didn’t) but rather for understanding where I was trying to go.

“The perspective here, submerged, is useful.” Sara wrote “I will probably use this in a class next year because I know my students will enjoy it, and that it will facilitate some good discussion.”

Her understanding illuminates the essence of why I write, shedding light on an ill, reaching a mind, and, if not helping, at least sparking dialogue, because it is in this flow that we learn. I write, in some small ways, to make a difference. I want to entertain, yes, of courses, but I always want to do more. I once read an interview given by John Steinbeck in which he stated the first part of “Grapes of Wrath” was story, getting the reader hooked, then later in the middle of the book he poured in what he wanted to say.

In 1996, in a small New York apartment Jonathan Franzen struggled with his novel. In despair he moved up-state for a change of scenery, and in his excellent essay “Perchance to Dream” Harpers Magazine, he tells of discovering a book in a small library when he needed it most “a novel pulled almost at random.” He feels “saved as a reader” and the chains of despair loosen. As a writer he had other issues to work out; mainly grappling with the approach to writing a novel in the new burgeoning “age of images” where history was fluid. To him the novel was losing meaning. But the book allowed him to grasp something solid and he began to pull himself out of the darkness.  

I too was writing in a small room, an attic in Prague. I too had my doubts. Why did I have this need to write? Reading “Perchance to Dream” which I happen to take along with a few books for my stay in the Golden City gave me hope. The novel I wrote would be the one that seventeen years later Sara would review.

Another writer moved me in the same way. Ken Kuhlken wrote an article three years prior to Franzen’s essay and he too wrote of coming upon a book on a library shelf, a book by a friend whom had passed away. They had been fellow students at the Iowa workshop in the mid- seventies along with Raymond Carver. The book had not been checked out for years. Sadness overcame him. He believed her too good a writer to be forgotten, and so he too reached out with his words and told her story.

Soon after reading Kuhlken’s article I completed my first collection of short stories. Stories I had been writing for six months, toiling away in a small house in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico. I searched Ken out at a writer’s conference because of his article. I was struck by his passion for the word and his loyalty to a friend. I knew he would understand the deep current below the surface of my every day, my desire to raise my voice, to be heard through my words. He did and his mentoring has been incalculable. We have been friends now for twenty years.

And so Sarah’s review moved me to reflection. I wrote my novel for those young men who dream the big dream of a professional sports career. A dream if pursued without a net and not achieved can be a long fall with an ensuing bad landing. I also had in mind a greater audience, all those who strive to achieve a dream and take all that comes with it. Those of common ilk, as Sara states, who while never having been an athlete “have deep understanding of addiction, ambition, and disenchantment.”

I write in hopes of reaching one reader.

We must all dream, such is life, but we must teach those that come after and learn from those that have gone before.