Archive for August, 2009
Webcast: How to develop “reader sensitivity”
In his 1985 book “How to Write Like a Pro,” magazine writer Barry Tarshis makes the following provocative statement about what it takes to be a good writer:
The most important attribute you can have as a writer is something I call “reader sensitivity.” I define reader sensitivity as an ongoing awareness of how your readers are processing and reacting to what you’ve written. It’s being able to put yourself in your reader’s shoes . . .
In accomplished writers, reader sensitivity appears to be intuitive, in the same way that some entertainers have an innate feel for how an audience is responding to their performance. But in the event this awareness is not an intuitive part of what you, as a writer, bring to writing, you are operating under an all but fatal handicap - and you will remain handicapped until you sensitize yourself to the likely response of your readers.
Reader sensitivity - part 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 4: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadByrdcliffe At Dusk
Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, September 2009
Twice a month each summer, a small walking tour comes to a halt on the dirt road outside the cabin where I live at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock. A dozen or so persons with little maps in their hands listen as the guide speaks, gesturing now and then in my direction. I can’t quite hear what she’s saying, but I’m sure she’s mentioning the name of my cabin, Quartette, and adding that like the rest of the colony, this low little building was built in 1903 or thereabouts and is therefore historic.
I am invisible behind my window, I know. And as I sit there, looking at all these people looking back at me but not seeing me, I find myself wondering about this veneration of an official past. I have lived at Byrdcliffe each summer for nine years, and it seems to me that not only myself but my neighbors, who like me have foolishly persisted in trying to be artists and writers, inhabit a reality undocumented by historians. It is a fragile reality, but alive — as beautifully ugly as a chicken-of-the-woods fungus growing on the bole of a tree. And you can’t press a fungus into a history book without killing it.
To read more, download the PDF.
The perils of making it up: readers “might want their money back”
Here’s a question that often comes up these days among writers and readers of nonfiction alike: Is it okay for a writer to “make things up”? Interestingly, at least one critically well-received travel writer thinks it is not only okay to make stuff up, it is essential to do so if the writer is aiming for not mere truth, but that far headier concoction, “poetic truth.”
The writer in question is Sara Wheeler, author of such travelogues as Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile. She is also the author of a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the English explorer who won fame for not only being the sole survivor of Scott’s disastrous expedition to the South Pole, but for writing a stunning book about the experience, The Worst Journey in the World.
Wheeler was understandably taken with Cherry-Garrad’s morose epic, given that she had been to the same continent herself. Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard came out in 2002, to excellent reviews. Two years later, writing in The Times of London, Wheeler confessed that she had, uh, well, made some things up.
