The Question of Purpose
In among all the offers of SEO optimization, lucrative bank-transfer schemes, and actual emails from lovely clients that end up in my inbox, I’ve noticed the same question, or genre of question, cropping up recently. Though it could be chalked up to a certain amount of stir-craziness, especially in those of us who endure more polar climates, I think the question is an interesting one; not only that, it’s a question I had to figure out how to answer, not once, but a few different times for a few different people. The emails went like this:
Dear Brock, I have written this piece, and I was hoping you would take a look at it and give me some feedback.
Not so unusual, right? Like always, I ask my interlocutor to send along the piece, and I ask a few questions of my own. First, I ask who the intended audience for the piece is. Second, I ask what the writer wants to do with it. Self-publish? Submit to an agent? Send to a lit mag? But the responses to my questions have gone like this:
Dear Brock, I don’t know who this piece is for. I just wrote it; it came out of me, and I don’t know why. I definitely don’t know what I want to do with it. What do you think?
Oh boy. I mean, first off, asking me “what I think” about something is a surefire way to receive an extremely long, ponderous email full of qualifications and caveats. It’s a cue for a lot of thinking, and not very much deciding. But, after some hand-wringing and time spent staring off into space, I sent them some version of the following.
Ultimately, of course, it’s entirely up to them who their writing is for and what they’d like to do with it—boom! One-line email! As an editor, until those questions are settled, my hands are pretty tied. One of the pieces I received was short, just a few thousand words. If it was to be submitted as a short story, we might be ready to jump right into a stylistic edit, tidying it up and working on the prose. But if it was the opening salvo for a novel, all of a sudden we’re deep in developmental territory, getting ready for outlines and charts and character sheets. It’s a big difference!
The first point I try to make—and I try to make it sensitively because not only does it have the potential to cause offence, but also to cost me a prospective project—is that not all writing has to be for something. It’s fine, really, truly fine, to write for the sake of writing. You could call it journaling; you could call it practicing; you could call it brainstorming, drafting, whatever. I’ve got notebooks full of “morning pages” in the style of Julia Cameron,[1] and they’re never going anywhere, and that’s fine. Writing can have therapeutic value, can help you organize your thoughts, and it can be an unmatched creative outlet.
But if someone’s sending me an email, obviously they’ve got the feeling that they want to take their writing somewhere. And writing of this uncertain, liminal sort falls into a somewhat uniform window: rarely does someone write 100,000 words of hard fantasy and not have a plan; neither does someone write two or three chapters about Greek history and not envision a completed book. The liminal stuff is most frequently hanging out on the spectrum of reminiscence, memoir, and self-reflection.
Which, of course, is why I lead with the point about journaling. But the desire to share your story—to tell others what you’ve been through and how you’ve managed it, in the hopes that your struggle might wind up as someone else’s help—is a fundamentally human impulse that’s probably responsible for a pretty good chunk of our overall historical activity. The question is: how?
And look, there’s nothing wrong at all with straight memoir. If you’ve got a single episode you’re hoping to share, a personal essay or short piece could be the way to go, workshopped until it’s ready to submit to a magazine, online or in print. If it’s a longer story being told, perhaps even a lifetime, then we’re looking at a book-length work. The hard truth about memoir, though, is that it’s damn hard to do well. And again, the decision-tree continues to diverge.
On the one hand, I have seen many excellent, well-written memoirs that were never destined or intended for publication. A grandparent wants to put their story down in order to pass it on to their children, grandchildren, and future generations. It doesn’t need an adrenaline-pumping hook, or an attentively crafted narrative arc; what’s most important is the emotion and vulnerability, the sheer truth of it. In this kind of memoir, having too many details is often a good thing, because otherwise how will those details be saved? Working on stuff like this requires a very different approach from writing whose authors dream of publication.
If a memoir is destined for the slush pile, however, it requires a whole extra layer of scrutiny. The straightforward chronology of a family story isn’t going to cut it, and the editing is going to be a lot more ruthless. The author is going to have to find a way to sell this story to people who have no personal interest in it whatsoever, and even with a solid niche—say, a businessperson’s memoir, or a naturalist’s—it would be a disservice to the work if I failed to view it with a literary critic’s eye. The why of the writing becomes more complex.
Sometimes, neither of these will appeal to an author. They want to play with the text; perhaps what they’ve written is only loosely based in their own life—maybe Uncle Edgar has disappeared and The Twins have been invented, just for fun—then what? What if they want to tidy up some of the mess, or sow chaos among stifling order?
At this point I’ll begin excitedly talking about autofiction. Autofiction takes the “auto” from autobiography and the “fiction” from, well, fiction. Popularized in recent years by big names like Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, autofiction has a long history that many suggest encompasses the works of authors like James Joyce and Marcel Proust (though the term only came to prominence in the ’70s). I’m always more inclined to point folks towards my favourites of the genre: Kate Zambreno,[2] Emmanuel Carrère,[3] and Sheila Heti.[4] I recently had the distinct pleasure of doing a small bit of work on a new autofictional book by JD Derbyshire; Mercy Gene comes out March 14 from Goose Lane Editions, and I highly recommend it.
An autofiction, too, will warrant an entirely different approach again from an editorial standpoint. And an author may well want to take things a step further, and bury the “I” completely in a “true” fiction (which, you can tell from my scare quotes in both cases, is more a convenience of genre rather than a reality of writing, in my opinion).
We haven’t yet even touched the question of format (Story? Article? Blog? Chapbook? Monograph? Book?), so you can imagine how long my emails have been lately. But as with many things in life, the possibilities can seem endless and the guides few. Boiling things down to goals (what do you want; forget what you think anyone else wants) and intuition (what’s your gut telling you about this story) is probably going to give you the best answer you’ll ever get. In my responses, I simply try my best to lay out some options; especially those that writers may not yet have considered.
[1] Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way (Penguin, 2016 [1992]).
[2] See, eg., Drifts (Penguin, 2021).
[3] See, eg., The Kingdom (Picador, 2018).
[4] See, eg., How Should A Person Be? (House of Anansi, 2014).
