January 23, 2008
little homunculi
Here’s what I’m interested in:
When you make things with an audience in mind, do you have internal representations of that audience to help guide you in the process? Are you in dialogue with a cast of proto-audience members that somehow represent different facets of your perceived audience? Are there little homunculi that provide editorial voices different from your own? Do you interact with them verbally or do you bounce things off of some sort of an emotional surface? Did some sort of averaging form them or were they inspired by particular moments of feedback? Do they have a shape? How would you describe their points of view? What do they look like? Do they have names? Are there ones you trust more than others? Are there ones you avoid?
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These are wonderful questions; thanks for posting this Andrew. I often think about such things in the context of preparing talks about creative process for my writing classes.
I am most drawn to this question: Do you interact with them verbally or do you bounce things off of some sort of an emotional surface? In my mind, when I am writing poems or fictions or personal essays, there isn’t really a “them”–but there is a kind of emotional surface. It’s as if there are two distinct parts of my mind working simultaneously, one of which is producing the flow of possibilities while the other sifts and selects and discards or holds as a “maybe.” I use myself as a guinea pig, and I know I’m onto something when a kind of elation I associate with discovery appears. At that point I may think of my wife, who is my best and most honest reader. I will perhaps get an anticipatory glimpse of her in my mind at that point–and often she is smiling or laughing in a way that gives me a further sense of being on the right track. I never visualize anybody else as an audience–except when I’m writing argumentative things, in which case I often visualize (faintly) a debate going on in a place like a classroom. Perhaps this is because speaking before a live audience allows the risk involved to increase blood flow to the brain, and even imagining it in this way has a similar effect.