The Decoded | No. 2 | By Lisanne
HOW TO CREATE something unique and personal that lasts and speaks to people, without conforming too much to what we think the audience is going to appreciate?
It’s the ultimate challenge for writers, and it’s the artist’s job to get into the very heart of that question.
In the introduction to Bagombo Snuff Box, a collection of his early short fiction, writer Kurt Vonnegut offered 8 tips for writing a good story. He writes, “Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
I believe in that statement because almost anyone can vent, blurt out thoughts and feelings, and express themselves in one form or another. But to communicate is a whole other thing.
To communicate successfully, you have to desire some form of connection. You have to care, not only about writing but also about being heard – which involves taking into account your audience. Their expectations, their perspectives, basically everything. Unlike the self-absorbed expressor, the communicator not only wants his audience to understand what he is trying to say, but he’s willing to work to make it happen.
However, tastes move on easily, and the eagerness to please can count on little admiration. As Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “A true artist takes no notice whatsoever of the public. The public to him is non-existent.”
And I think that’s true too. In order to create something meaningful and unique, the counterintuitive but really necessary thing for writers is to detach from what’s the new thing at the moment. But to articulate what they genuinely feel and experience and first find things they’re excited about writing. In the end, it’s the excitement that flows into the work and will make it stand out.
So in some ways, writing is like a message in a bottle you throw into the sea. You’ll never know where it arrives, how it will be perceived, and by whom. At its best, the writing is unique and sparks a conversation. At its worst, it has lost its creativity and merely functions as a colorless whole that appeals to no one, including yourself. Writing for an audience, instead of – to an audience means sacrificing the gift that’s distinctively yours.
In order to create something meaningful we must make pleasing ourselves – not others – a habit, so that if that message in a bottle is not going to be received or appreciated, it was still worth the ride.
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