In the present day, for a great many who have embraced the profession as their own, writing has become a service industry, not unlike kitchen work or delivery. I have experienced this; it can pay well, it can be stable and secure, it can even be a half-decent way to spend one's day, so long as there are not too many days when it feels like a real job.
But writing ad copy or rephrasing quarterly reports is not "writing" in the Shakespearean, Thackarean or Hemingwayesque sense, but rather "communication" on the scale of runes scratched on tree bark to send a message that a man is stuck in the mud, as in the Kipling Just So story. Communication is repeating something that we already know in a clarifying manner, in the most efficient way possible, to enable a process, such as sales, or decision-making for a company reading said reports, that has nothing actually to do with either the message or the method. This is what many writers who are caught up in the "service industry" logic fail to distinguish; that while thoughts are communicated through writing, the point isn't to communicate those thoughts to a specific person, or even a specific kind of person. The point is to communicate those thoughts because they need communicating, listener be damned.
I am commonly exhorted by various voices to write content that publishers will want to publish, because it will make them money. To get published, this content must not offend; it must not contain a possibility of being misunderstood; it must not be about subjects that are too "unfriendly" to the largest number of people; it must not depict persons in a way that would be considered demeaning, or punching either up or down, or across either. In short, I must write what already exists, but in sufficiently different words so that I am saying things that are safe and have already been said, but in a way they haven't been said before, or at least in a way that most people don't know hasn't been said before. Oh, and despite the resistance against "punching," it must be conflict-driven. That's very important.
It was not necessary for Shakespeare to write this way, as essentially there were no rules except for the ownership of the Globe, who did not care about anyone's hurt feelings — largely because the audience was free to express this by actively throwing things, with the approval of the management, that being the state of the theatre at the time. "Be an actor my son, but be ready to dodge."
More importantly, Shakespeare could not have written for me, personally, or anyone alive right now, no matter how many marketing experts he might have dug up like Yorick to tell him how to create conflict without punching down. Yet miraculously, he managed to write jokes that I have understood and laughed aloud at, in rooms of people not laughing, there to see Shakespeare the way they went to church, unaware entirely of the subtext. The funniest thing about my seeing Twelfth Night, my favourite Shakespearean play, is all the laughing I'm going to do in a near silent room. It says something, I think, about the failure of writing as "communication." More often than not, because of the listener, the jokes don't land, however "there" they are.
Furthermore, this concept of target-audience engineering need not examples from so far in the past to show how clumsy is their design. To begin with, there is the great mass of authors post-1950 who simply fail to make inroads with the modern reader... but obviously, we don't suggest that Capote, Vonnegut, Plath, Ginsberg or Thompson shouldn't have bothered writing because, without their historical weight, they'd have faceplanted as authors if their first books had been published today. No, we're perfectly willing to make concessions that for them, in their time, without the engineering, it was okay to just go ahead and write whatever the hell they wanted, confident that today they'd still have readers, without the need of a 2026 publisher. Of course, none of these writers were any good, right. I mean, none of them were worth reading, since they did punch down, and up, and sideways, and at themselves, with no regard whatsoever against an audience that had no rotten fruit to throw. We don't read them because they were good, no. Obviously not. We read them because... because... wait, why?
Well, I suppose because we can be BIG enough to grant a freedom to the dead, to write what they like, that can no longer be granted to the living. That seems plain enough.
To end with, I'll casually point out that no one in any era worth their sand, the term that used to apply to a person having value, waited for permission to write something. Nor did they pay any attention to approval, bans, refusals to publish or the prospect of being "disliked," which apparently is the worst thing that can happen to a person. If they could not make themselves heard one way, they found another. The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well, he just did not give a fuck about who read or did not read his work. He did not write for other people. This is the point I started with. Writers do not write for readers. That's the role of the communicator.
Communication with words as a service industry is about being paid to write content that one is told to write. We are given a job, much like being asked to make a Monte Cristo sandwich; that job involves the arrangement of words to ensure, at their best, that they can only be understood one way. If I say that this company last year broke ground on a gas plant outside Sundre, and that the plant has reached a point where a definite date can now be named for when sour gas at that plant will begin processing, then the date matters, the clarity of what's going to happen on that date, how much of it is going to happen, where the supply will arrive from and where the finished product will go, how much it will cost according to the present figures, how much the predicted future will adjust those figures and so on, then all of this has to be crystal clear if the goal is to publish so an investor who might want to visit and tour the plant already has the correct information at their fingertips. The Monte Cristo's cheese has to be cooked just so, the bread dipped in the right amount of egg, and browned, just so, and cut just so, and plated just so, and on, so that it looks precisely like every other Monte Cristo this kitchen will make today, regardless of the cook making it. Communication, when done well, is not subject to the writer's footprint; it is best if the writer of the communication doesn't have one, since that will only muddy the message.
Human beings are not clear. They are muddy. Their motives are never straightforward and singular. Communicative writing is not natural because it requires us to think in a manner that diminishes the nuance that we are comfortable living with every day. The challenge, then, is that no matter how clear we make a thing, no matter how we flatten it into the most boring passages ever about the future of a sour gas plant, someone will misunderstand it because we are not built to all read things about gas plants or taste Monte Cristos in the same way. This makes communicative writing extremely frustrating, because no matter how one tries, the reader just won't have it. This is the point of Kipling's How the First Letter Was Written, because it invents a story about the invention of writing and the story is about how writing as a technology is a total disaster. Despite the effort to write a message for his daughter to carry, Tegumai only discovers that everyone misunderstands his efforts and his daughter Taffy is dearly tormented for his efforts. It is the most important story for a writer to read, I should think, because it carries a message a writer should never forget.
Do not write for other people, unless disappointment is your aim.
Mind you, I say this as I write for other people.
This right now, that I am doing, is communicative writing. I am writing a blog post explaining something I think deserves to be explained, but I fully expect it not to be understood, because it is not the nature of people to learn, appreciate or grasp things they do not already believe.
With my last post, I talked about my tendency to argue in association with a coffeeshop/bookstore that I ran for a brief time. I'll throw in that I began arguing in that other great crucible in which we're all forced to swim during our youth, school. School for me was a situation where 29 trapped people, and me, would get into these arguments that I would impose ruthlessly, as was my nature then and is my nature now. I remember one of these was the argument that a hero "is a brave person." The class agreed. I did not. I did not believe then that it was so and 45 years has not changed my mind about this. A hero is a person who is there, who doesn't think, who does what's next, then afterwards generally thinks, "Oh my gawd, I could have died doing that. What as I thinking." That's my point. No thinking in the moment is involved. No thinking, no time to be "brave." One is too busy acting.
For years after school, here, there, I'd meet people who'd known me and disliked me who would come up to me at a mall or a restaurant or on the street and act like we'd always been old friends and isn't it great and how is your life going, that sort of thing. And quite often they'd say something to me like, "I remembered that thing you said (eight years ago, when we were 15) and you know what, you were right. I only realised it a long time later, when (tells story about how they came to the same conclusion). I just wanted you to know."
When this happens often enough, one begins to realise that a lot of people argue against a premise not because the premise is false, but because they just haven't had enough personal experience to know one way or the other, so they assume the safest course of action: that "Something I don't personally know is necessarily false." This actually makes a lot of sense to me. As a writer, it makes the point that the argument written down isn't an argument for the time it was written, but for all time. That anyone, at any point in their life, might come back to a thing written again, only to find that now it makes sense, when once it did not. This is a very strong reason to write things that won't be (presently) understood by people. Because we live in four dimensions, not three.
Writing, understand, not being communicative, can be as muddy as the writer wants it to be. A given sentence can have two, three, even four meanings. Take my phrase about Charles Bukowski:
"The only reason we know who Charles Bukowski was is because, well..."
These 12 words are enough, because the above, unlike communicative writing, is not clear. It doesn't tell you who Bukowski is; it does not define him as a poet; it does not explain, for those who do not know the reference, how it is the right reference here. Nor does it say if I personally like Bukowski. None of this is communicated. Intentionally. Because those who know the poet already know the story; those who don't know him won't benefit from the story. My liking him or not is irrelevant to my knowledge of him, and my awareness of how he's the right modern person to be inserted here.
Omissions like this are not accidents. Writing intentionally plays mind games; it sets out to do far more than lead you down a garden path to a plot twist, it willingly makes you believe that you're in a day garden when actually you're blindfolded, it's night, there's a cliff a foot to your left and no, I'm not the author of this tale, I'm the devil. Writing is about deliberately laying a story out in such a way that it can be read today with this impression given, only to find oneself waking in the night and thinking, "Wait a minute... what happened to the dog?"
These things are not "plot holes." More often than not a "plot hole" is a reader that has failed to pay attention (though, granted, with a lot of films, that is not always so). These things are deliberate to make the reader see the world in a manner that isn't meant to communicate on a conscious level, but a subconscious one. It is dirty pool, it is mendacity and brainwashing and a hoodwink. It is also delicious, which is why it continues despite all the other things we might do instead. We like to read, because it offers a cunning puzzle that cannot be found elsewhere: a human puzzle, where the rules do not reflect what's nice or normal or approved. The best books are not the ones we liked best. The best books are those we cannot make ourselves stop thinking about.
If there is a book you might hate, such that you find yourself railing against it and it's author with a vehemence that is unlike you, that is because the work got under your skin. That's what makes it a good book. You fought that book and you lost. And you don't like that. Too bad.
Books, like people, do not exist that we may approve of them. They exist with the ability to act freely upon the reader, just as your neighbour is free to do with his damned garden hose, or the co-worker with their need to slap a sticky note on your computer screen, or whatever miserable, terrible, sometimes beloved things that human beings do to human beings. A work of literature needs no more justification for its presence than does any human not actively bothering you on this planet... because whatever you may think, the most awfulest book by Ayn Rand or Robert Heinlein does not have the power to grab you and make you read it. But, like people you don't like, you still have to live on a planet where these exist. Worse for you, we continue to generally believe as a culture that it's inappropriate to burn these things, just as it is people... and in fact, that is what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."
Thus, when we write, it is not another bit of non-offensive fluff that fails to punch that we strive to write, when we think of ourselves as writers. No, just as I taught my daughter to use her fists, so that she could defend herself if the time came, I give my books fists too, so they can punch as hard as they need. And if the reader doesn't like that...?
Well... fuck the reader.
