Communication
June 1, 2000
7:34 a.m.
Do you write for an audience or just for yourself? I read Karen Meisner's "Thought Experiment" last night--one where she sent everyone off to Tim Pratt's discussion of art and communication. Read them if you think it will be helpful! The more I thought about it, the more I stumbled over the issue. Can there be art without communication? It's an interesting question, if for no other reason than to use as a thought experiment. This, of course, makes it a natural topic for Karen's site. This is my site, however. And I write about Daily Persistence in all its ugly glory. The question bugged me (and bugs me) because it seems ... well ... how to say this correctly. Well, it seems awfully elementary. Writers (and other artists) all want to be enjoyed. We may each be pointing to a different specific audience, but pretty much everyone who is really working at an artistic endeavor is trying to get a rise out of someone else, or provoke them, or move them to do something--even if that something is nothing more than grin as they put their work down and go on their merry way through their day. You see, to my simple brain, art is communication. In one of the many articles you read at the Writers of the Future gig, Hubbard goes as far as to say "Art is a word which summarizes the quality of communication." Yeah, yeah, you can argue that the guy wrote pulp. But he wrote good pulp, and he communicated with his audience of the day in a way that an awful lot of other writers wanted to emulate. Don't confuse the issue with all the baggage. The full quotation that "Art for art's sake" comes from (as identified in Bartlett's, anyway) is a Victor Cousin comment: "We need religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, and art for art's sake." Think about this for a little bit. Maybe you'll find something interesting about its application to the topic. I think this issue bothers writers a lot, because of our intense desire to see ourselves as being at least as worthy as other writers, or, perhaps even more so. And more popular writers, who appeal to the masses, of course, make us feel inferior and intimidated. So, we start talking about how their work is somehow less valuable, that their art has less intrinsic merit, merely because it is purchased by hundreds of thousands rather than merely understood by a couple hundred people who understand enough background to actually "get" a piece. Stephen King is a great communicator. Many performance artists and poets are not great communicators. This type of artist often hide their message in such a fashion as the consumer has to work harder to understand what happened. Writers and storytellers a can do this, too. When one leaves out a structural element of a story, or blurs it in hopes that a reader will fill it in with his or her mind and experiences, we're making the consumer work harder to catch what happened (an act that communicates a message in itself). Example: the movie "Eyes Wide Shut" is a story with parts of the structure left to the consumer to fill in. Yes, I can do it. And yes, that communicates a message. But I came away from it unsatisfied because I was looking for enough of the message provided by the medium for me to attempt to assess and judge. When I supplied it myself, I found myself only assessing and judging myself--which I can do a lot more cheaply merely by writing in this journal. Art that is consumed communication. It cannot help but be communication because the people that consume it are human beings, and human beings take every situation they are confronted with, absorb it to whatever level of detail they feel comfortable with, and then make judgements and assessments of merit and thought. For example, I am far enough along that I occasionally get folks commenting on my stories, and telling me what they got out of them. Oftentimes I'll admit to being amazed at what I hear -- of particular note was "The Disappearance of Josie Andrew," which is the tale I had on the preliminary Nebula ballot last year. The short and long of the comments were that the story was about abortion, and that my position was opposite of whatever the reader's position was. Overall, I thought these responses were fascinating in themselves, but it's especially interesting in that the primary thing I had in my mind as I wrote it was how I felt about the situation as a father. On the other hand, art can also be therapy. If you keep a secret journal, you're practicing art but you're committing self-therapy. In that sense, maybe you're communicating with your inner self. I'm okay with that interpretation if you're dying to go there. This, I think, is the reason why the issue is elementary. Why do we care? Well, let's turn it around. If art This is really hard work. Most writers, I believe--especially new writers--do not know what their stories are about. Alan Rodgers talked a lot about this at the last Writers of the Future session (he came over to spend a few evenings with us), and I tend to agree with him, though not on his adamant nature on the subject. Sometimes I think writers can get so caught up in trying to make every message in every story something gut-wrenching and deep, and that just tends to get me constipated when it comes to ideas ... but that's another subject all together. Anyway, if you're going to communicate (which as a public writer you are, because people will force you to, regardless of your desires, remember?) and it's going to be good communication, you should know what you're trying to say--maybe not when you sit down to write it, but certainly after you're done. So, art is communication and art is therapy. It's probably several other things, too. Feel free to take your shots. But overall, the best news of all is that it's all true. And when we write, we get to take advantage of it all. Most writers enjoy the process to some extent. Why shouldn't they? The process is the therapy. The process is the inner communication, the coming to grips with how you think about something. The process is scrubbing ideas against your mind and letting them fall out onto the paper. Then, for the better communicators and craftsmen and linguistic artists comes publication, and hence grander communication. It's the best of both worlds. Why not enjoy them all?  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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