Laurie Perez Novelist

Have we met?

“Is it ‘pandering’ to write with the tastes and expectations of the popular audience in mind?” Writing a novel is not a severe schoolhouse, where you rap the knuckles of the readers if their attention wanders. Instead it is a cooperative endeavor, in which your text provides the road map -- the GPS, if you're really trying to communicate -- and you also point out sights and sounds along the way. But the readers have to perform the story in their own brains. It's not your voice they'll hear, but their own, speaking the words of the text in their own minds. Reading brings language into the mind through the auditory processes of the brain, so if your text puts up barriers to attention and aspiration, and the readers drift away, never to return, that's the author's fault. Maybe the few who keep reading have passed some moral or obedience test; maybe the many who give up on it have demonstrated their membership in the culture you are supposedly talking to. Some writers aspire to write "for the ages," but I believe that we must first communicate with readers of our own contemporary culture. What kind of self-destructive TV executive would try to put on the air a contemporary drama, or even a historical one, using scripts from shows of the 1950s and early 60s?  Watch reruns of once-strong and popular shows like The Rifleman, Cheyenne, Leave It to Beaver, Bachelor Father, or Bonanza and imagine trying to shoot a series today using the same scripts. If you cannot speak to the culture you live in, your stories won't be around to find an audience in 2056 or 2116. Thirty years, even sixty years, are not quite "for the ages," but aspiring to reach your living audience is not an unworthy goal.  Those who write only to please themselves and, perhaps, God or the Muses, should not even bother printing out the manuscript and putting it in a trunk. My daughter used to try out new fonts on our computer by writing the beginnings of stories, then walking away. We would find it later, this story opening, sitting on the computer screen unsaved, no filename in place. We would name the file ourselves and save it, because she was, even as a preteen and teenager, an extraordinarily gifted writer and storyteller. But THAT is what people do when their art is so pure that they don't care about pleasing an audience -- they walk away without choosing Save As from the File menu. The minute you name that file or print out that script, you are confessing that you aspire to reach someone, some audience member who will receive your tale with eager attention.  It is not a sin to write in such a way as to invite attention, to attract the readers' hopes and fears. We aspire to communicate with readers who care about and believe in the same things that we the writers do, or who are at least willing to follow along with us for part of our journey down the road. It is a worthy goal, a pro-social role, to attempt to be good company for the other travelers, so they'll choose to join up with us tomorrow, and to continue to journey with us to the destination of our choosing.

Can you see the trilogy on Pablo’s bookshelf, tucked in with Octavia Butler, Sylvia Plath and Whitman? Those are my books and right now they’re super cheap in the UK and US 📚 🔗 mybook.to/amie-series speculative fiction “strangely euphoric” and “mind-bending”