Writing from the heart and writing exercises

Last week I wrote about a scholar who does great work, but whose dissertation has not satisfied its reviewers. I am, to some extent, writing about that same or a tangential concern and a related idea that came up in my creative writer’s group. A poet in the group was talking about submitting work to various journals/e-journals and about his recognition of the tension between writing what he wanted to write and writing what would suit the journal/editor. This is a similar tension to that experienced by a scholar who is trying to please an audience that is in some way hostile to their work.  To what extent do you change what you say to please the audience? Especially when the audience has power—power to accept or reject your work? This is, in a way, one face of “selling out”: doing work that you don’t really believe in for financial gain.

To speak of “selling out” focuses on a sacrifice of integrity, and that’s not really where I want to go. I think there is a lot more to the dynamic between writer and audience than a simple, clear assumption that pleasing and audience is always a sacrifice of integrity. There is a balance that can be found between (1) writing for yourself and to be true to your own vision and (2) writing to please an audience, especially one that doesn’t want the same things you do. There’s a lot in this dynamic that I’m not going to discuss in this post. I want to focus on just one suggestion: view the task of writing to please a specific (possibly hostile) audience as an exercise in developing your ideas and your skill as a writer.

A scholar—or any writer—should be aiming to write about things that really matter personally. Write about things that you really care about and believe in. If you’re working on something that you care about and believe in, it’s much easier to do the work, and much more satisfying to work, and that generally means that there’s less danger of writer’s block or avoidance.

But what do you really care about? Is that something that can be expressed in only one way? To what extent can you shape your work to suit your audience without sacrificing your own integrity?

It seems to me that any idea can be expressed in many different ways.  It seems to me that most really substantive ideas have multiple dimensions that could be discussed in varying proportion to suit varying audiences.

To put this in terms of poetry, one might choose to express some thought—the transient nature of life, for example—in different poetic forms—sonnet, haiku, etc. Each form shapes how the idea is expressed, but none fundamentally change the underlying idea (or at least none need change the underlying idea—but most writers learn as they write, and learning does change ideas).

When writing to an audience that wants something other than what you want—if you really want to write haiku and your audience is expecting or demanding a sonnet, you can say “I’m not going to do it! I write haiku!”  That would lead to something of an impasse. What I am suggesting is that you approach such situations saying to yourself, “Maybe I can learn something from the exercise of writing a sonnet. Maybe I can learn something about my ideas and something about the craft of writing that will help me write better haiku in the future.”

Approach such situations is as an exercise—opportunities to stretch your communicative repertoire.  If you don’t want to write what the other person wants to read, and if you think of the task in those terms, you can easily feel resentment for having to work on something that you don’t want to work on. If you say “can I choose words that will satisfy my critical reviewer and also stay true to my purpose?”, then your challenge may not be flavored with resentment—and that’s worth a lot (especially if you are one of those people for whom resentment fuels procrastination).

There is a lot that can be done to shape a presentation of your ideas without sacrificing them or your integrity.  Let’s set aside extreme cases where you are called upon to make a statement that directly contradicts your beliefs—if the editor at the journal wants a poem on a subject you don’t want to write about, don’t write it. If your professor wants you to say “Marx was right about everything” and you don’t agree, don’t write it. But if you’re not being forced to a direct contradiction of your beliefs, then look for the challenge of writing your own ideas in a way that will reach the difficult audience. Look for the opportunity to develop your skill as a writer and the opportunity to find a new way to express a familiar idea.

You may need to (temporarily) abandon the ways in which you have previously tried to write about your work.  This can be frustrating and difficult, but it can be a great learning experience for a writer—both in terms of developing a greater discursive repertoire and skill as a writer.

Looking for new ways to communicate and old idea doesn’t change the underlying purposes, the underlying quality, or the underlying value of the work. It doesn’t stop the underlying message from being shared with others in other forms.  What it does do is stretch the scholar/writer’s ability to bridge communicative and intellectual gaps.

There is a problem in trying to write in a way that reaches people with whom you have fundamental disagreements—trying to write in their language often requires adopting some of the conceptual structures that they use.  This makes the exercise in trying to write across these communicative gaps quite difficult while still remaining true to your own vision.  But, if you remember to think of the exercise as an exercise—an attempt to develop the ability to write/speak to disparate audiences—then these dangers are challenges to be surmounted, rather than causes to abandon your beliefs.

Cultural appropriation and appropriate responses

The APA Manual discusses bias in writing and suggests, basically, that if anyone is offended, the writing should be considered offensive, and change is worth considering. I’d like to take this premise as the basic starting point for this discussion: if someone is offended, it is worth considering doing something different.  If someone feels hurt, that feeling should be taken very seriously.

At the same time, however, not all hurts are the same.  And losing sight of that, means sucking important nuance out of any possible dialogue that might move toward redress of hurts.

It is the loss of nuance in the debate that worries me. If serious ills are conflated with minor ills, it makes it harder to generate community action to address (and redress) the serious ills.

The recent case of Keziah Daum’s prom dress brought this question to mind, but I had already been thinking about those issues due to several previous situations that sparked cultural appropriation debates.

Cultural appropriation can be a serious problem. Many people have really suffered from it. For example, historically, the US music industry was a cultural appropriation machine that stole millions from African American musicians. White people got rich on music drawn from African Americans, while the African Americans who first made the music got little or nothing. It was a large-scale issue. 

At the same time, again, not all hurts are equal. The class of “micro-aggressions” explicitly marks the limited nature of those hurts.  This is not to say that micro-aggressions ought to be ignored, but again, this invites the question of degree of hurt and appropriate responses to that hurt. If micro-aggressions were equivalent to outright aggression, then no one would create the term “micro-aggression” to describe them.

Are all cases of cultural appropriation equal? Clearly not. Some cases of cultural appropriation affect the flow of millions of dollars, and directly impact the lives of many. Other cases? Well, what about the case of Keziah Daum and the response thereto?

Let us give full respect to the feelings and lives of those who were hurt by her decision to wear that dress, pose in the way she did, and post that image. Let us also retain nuance in the conversation by understanding the degree of injury and other potential ill effects of Daum’s choice to wear the dress and to post the now-infamous images, and the question of what is an appropriate response.

Let us suppose that you are browsing, you come across Daum’s post, and you are hurt. What hurts have you suffered from that image? Emotional hurts are significant and real, so we’ll count them. Are there other injuries from that image? Specific injuries from those posts or from Daum’s actions that led to the posts?

Let’s put aside a more general critique of Daum and society: perhaps she is more generally culpable, and unquestionably larger society has committed bad acts of cultural appropriation, but nonetheless, this image is a single act. Do we want to condemn this one act as if it embodied a who person’s life? What specific injury does the image do?  Asking whether Daum is guilty of other things is not entirely at issue. Now one might think, on seeing the image, that Daum needs to be educated—an idea with merit (of course, I’m generally biased toward education)—but that is a separate question from the question of what the image does.

So what is an appropriate response to the image? If that image is hurtful, should it be spread as far and wide as possible? That seems like it would only hurt more people.  And if the image is spread with the idea of censuring Daum (assuming that she needs censure) will that censure help promote the idea of cultural sensitivity and help prevent cultural appropriation?

Until this event Daum was hardly well known, now she has become a flashpoint of cultural conflict.  If no one had decided to spread the image as a display of cultural appropriation, Daum would have remained in shadows. Does making an example of her help the fight against cultural appropriation?

I don’t want to make light of the hurt that anyone might have suffered through Daum’s choice of dress, use at prom, and images posted on public forums.  But personally, I don’t think turning Daum’s dress into an issue of import helps eliminate cultural appropriation.  Cultural appropriation should be eliminated, but I don’t think the way to go about it is to lose sight of the nuance in the discourse.  Some hurts are too small to warrant a reaction. The potential hurts of Daum’s act seem small, and that makes the complaint a weaker issue to use in any public discourse that attempts to educate people about the ills of cultural appropriation.

About a year ago, a burrito shop in Portland, Oregon similarly became a “cultural appropriation” flashpoint, and that case was one in which the response seemed grossly out of proportion.  This little burrito shop run by two women was open on weekends. Let’s say they were basically stealing—how much were they stealing? The cost of dozens of burritos? That’s a bad thing. But what about Taco Bell? Is it owned and managed by Mexicans or is it cultural appropriation on a massive scale? The wave of public sentiment against that little burrito shop didn’t transform into a wave of public censure of Taco Bell. Is that an appropriate set of responses?  

If we want to convince people that cultural appropriation is a real problem that we should work to fix, it would be effective, I think, to try to focus on more serious instances—and that means instances where a lot of money is changing hands, or where people are suffering serious immediate injuries. By focusing on cases with smaller impact—a weekend burrito shop or a high school student wearing a prom dress—it makes it easier for complaints about the real problem to be brushed off as just another example of a non-problem imagined by some fevered liberal.  

This is about rhetoric and debate and how to shift public opinion on the large scale. Many people—the same people would would think in terms of “fevered liberals”—view the idea of cultural appropriation as ridiculous. These are the people whose opinions it would be most valuable to change—what discourse is going to reach them and educate them and get them to be more sensitive to the real problem of cultural appropriation?  Complaining about Daum might be very effective in reaching people who already believe that cultural appropriation is a problem, but is it effective in reaching people who don’t take cultural appropriation seriously?

In rhetoric and debate, it is, of course, very effective to fix upon an example that sparks a strong emotion.  But when the emotions generated are anger and resentment, it makes it harder for people to work together. And when emotions run high, it’s easy to lose the important nuance.

We don’t want to lose nuance in this debate (or in any debate, if we can help it), because that loss of nuance makes it harder to address and ameliorate the difficult and significant problems that face us—“us” the community of scholars, “us” the people of the US, and “us” the people of the world.

Cooperation won’t grow out of disrespecting the opposite side of the argument. Cooperation grows out of seeing the opposite side of the argument as real humans despite their faults.

Structural Thinking

I met a young woman, an undergraduate at Cal, and asked her what she was studying. "Rhetoric," she said, sighing, "a completely worthless degree." I was obliged to disagree.

What is rhetoric? "The art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing," says one dictionary; "the study of the elements used in literature and public speaking, such as content, structure, cadence and style," says another. In short, it is the study of how to effectively present ideas, distinct from the question of whether the idea is good or not. This has led to rhetoric getting a bad rap--"language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content," says the first dictionary; "affectation or exaggeration...unsupported or inflated discourse," says the second.

Bad rap or not, we have to learn how to think in these terms. the five paragraph essay that they used to teach in elementary school or junior high--that gets a bad rap now, too. But it is an elegant example of basic rhetorical principles. You have an opening paragraph that introduces the idea to the reader, you have three examples, and you have a conclusion that ties everything up. This is, in simple form, the basic structure of a lot of really effective speaking and writing. Yes, there are those who wish to create emotional effects of surprise or blind enthusiasm who might not wish to present material this way, but as academic writers we want to follow the basic paradigm: introduce the ideas, give details/examples that develop the ideas presented in the introduction, and then wrap up the discussion by summarizing the main points and talking about what the point of the whole exercise was--what you take moving forward.

Whether talking about a paragraph, a section, a chapter, or the whole work, we can always use the same basic paradigm for thinking about how we are presenting our ideas to an audience. We can always rely on the template:
First I introduce the ideas I discuss in this [paragraph|section|chapter|dissertation]
Second I present materials that develop the ideas of the [paragraph|section|etc.]
Finally, I draw conclusions from the material I presented in the [paragraph|etc.].

At the level of the academic writer, with the scope of the dissertation, there are certainly structural liberties one can take, if one is a confident writer. But if one is struggling to write, using a worthy template can help simplify the problem--by simplifying the rhetorical aspect of the argument, one can focus on the logic, theory and analysis and use of data.

Thinking about the rhetorical aspect--how do I present this to an audience? how do I draw the audience in? how do I ensure that they will follow me where I want to go?--can provide an extra angle by which to help organize material. Sometimes ideas don't organize themselves in linear forms--for example some ideas face chicken-and-egg problems: you can't understand one without understanding the other, so which do you present first? A template can help somewhat, if you think of it as a way of imposing order on the ideas--an additional order that doesn't exist in the ideas themselves, but that serves your rhetorical purposes.

For example, when presenting material that has the aforementioned chicken-and-egg problem, you can think in terms of roles. Suppose you have four parts to the main idea. you can impose roles on the ideas: one part is presented first an an introduction: it defines ideas and sets up the rest of the discussion. The second part will still do some defining of ideas, but it will also start to go into greater depth; it presumes familiarity with the basics (provided by the first part), so it can look more at complexities; the third part then begins the process of closing up the argument: it brings out the details and the full depth of the argument, so that all the main detail and complexity of the has been brought out before the final section. The final part (of this hypothetical four-part idea) is used to summarize and conclude; what details you discuss of the fourth part of the idea can be used to bring together the details from the other parts to highlight the points that you want to make.

Ok, I've obviously simplified this example. There may not be four parts, and they may not want to work the way I've described, but whatever you write can follow the simple elegant template of introducing, giving details, and concluding. This template provides a way to think about how to communicate with your audience. If you can see a way to use it, it could make writing easier.

You may be saying something like "oh no, something else to think about; this just makes it more complicated. I don't have time for this." On one level that's like saying "I don't have time to look in the rearview mirror when driving": the consequences may not be as dire, but it's something you have to think about to write well. On another level, even though it may seem like it makes it more complicated at first, I believe that it helps simplify the project: by looking at the work from the additional perspective, by adding additional conditions to satisfy, you limit what the final piece will look like, thus giving you better direction and reducing the number of possibilities that you need to consider.

In order to effectively communicate our ideas--which is our goal in writing--it helps to think of the rhetorical aspects: how is the work going to be presented? By thinking about the role structure will play in communicating our ideas to an audience, we can give ourselves valuable guidance that will help organize our writing.