Anne, are you more careful in your local column because you perceive its audience as being different from your blogging audience, because you see the two media involved as requiring different levels of carefulness, or both?

Writing for paper publication is a completely different prospect than writing for blogs is. If you haven’t gone through a change while you’ve written, if you haven’t agonized over where to put that word, if your work hasn’t been disarticulated at the hands of an editor, you haven’t written anything worth the work of publishing. I think that is a very personal matter and very much in the hands of the author.

ME: You guys and your “if I can’t see it, it isn’t there” logic.

I was going to get to this in a following post, but since it has come up now, here’s my opinion on what blogs show us about audience:
Blogs reveal a higher percentage of an audience’s creativy, a creativity that has always been there. It’s just that blogs etc. have opened up a window onto that aspect of writer-audience relationship. I think I made this point somewhere else, can’t remember where, possibly in a comment to you, Stephen, that a high percentage of blog readers don’t respond directly to the post. Do we assume then that because they don’t document their response that means they had none? I think that it’s reasonable to suggest that a fair percentage of the invisible audience members experience some kind of creative response or respond with burst of creativity of some sort. And clearly audience silence, as you have perceived it, has had an effect on you and your writing. It has effects on me, just not the same effects.

Here’s an interesting example that happened to me just yesterday. I read one and a half very exciting and stimulating chapers of Shannon Hale’s _Goose Girl_ aloud to my 9-yr-old daughter. Afterwards, I had powerful urges to get up and fix my family dinner (food played an important role in these pages). My daughter followed me out to the kitchen and began pacing up and down. She told me a dream she had had the night before and as she got into and out of chairs and paced the carpet on the other side of the kitchen counter she began to spin a remarkable tale out of that dream, which involved a professor sending people out into the wilderness. He gave the people a choice: they could go out into the forest or the desert. Our family was in the dream and we chose to go to the desert. On and on this tale went, augmenting the dream until whole clans and skills levels and building materials and customs sprang forth.

I see a direct relationship between my wanting to create a meal for my family, my daughter’s creative outburst, and the experience of reading together those passages from _Goose Girl_.

As for this part of your comment: “If you haven’t gone through a change while you’ve written, if you haven’t agonized over where to put that word, if your work hasn’t been disarticulated at the hands of an editor, you haven’t written anything worth the work of publishing. I think that is a very personal matter and very much in the hands of the author.”

I have had this pleasure, but I don’t come to the same conclusions about it as you have. We may not hear, or read, or in any other way perceive obvious responses to our writing, in the case of published paper writing because the curtain is just beginning to rise on the audience and the lights are only now being turned up. Blogs, etc., are revealing aspects of audience that have always been. Furthermore, audience creativity affects writers in ways writers may not fully be conscious of. But here’s how it affects me: the fact that I’m sending my words out in the world, beyond my sight and beyond my time, where they might facilitate the creation of new experiences I might never be aware of or ultimately have any control over, causes me to write in a state of high faith. Your ideas about writing form your narrative pathways. The agony isn’t as private as you think–in fact, it’s probably something more like archetypal. Meaning gets beyond us and it gets us beyond ourselves. So cool, so cool. By heaven, I like that.

But now here I am, using a computer at work, which makes me feel like some kind of skate or … or … gosh, like one of those blogging lawyers or something. I don’t want to think about it.

William said: “I think that the more interesting relationship between authors and audience is in television and film. Writers now (for good and ill) are exposed to a lot of feedback about characters, story lines etc. This is especially the case with television series.”

Me: Yes, that’s interesting, but because we can see the effects of audience interaction in some media doesn’t mean it isn’t there in others. Many creative reactions are not documented in expected ways.

William: “I don’t know of any instances where writers have made huge changes to plot lines as the result of audience feedback (most of it via the Internet, of course), but I have read several interviews where writers have said that reaction caused them to discuss things.

And there have been several instances where the writers have written shout outs and nods to their fanbase into a show.”

Me: I’m certain many writers maintain blogs where they interact more closely with their readers with similar results. At times, writers might not be fully conscious of the effects such interactions might have on their creative process. But I’m not just talking about the kind of creative outbreaks where audience response affects the writer’s creative product, I’m talking about the whole creative gestalt that involves writer and audience members the way a metaphor yokes two seemingly separate and possibly unlike things in order to create the surprise of new meaning, something that’s bigger than its parts. New meaning is something that arises, probably more often that not, in undocumented spaces. Writers show up at the visible tip of that iceberg and often claim responsibility for the whole thing, or else they have credit for it thrust upon them.

i think your ideas are being reified in the blogosphere. As I’ve read blogs and attempted to write my own, I’ve noticed that, in many ways, the author is nowhere near as important as the audience.

For example I’ve read a few blog posts that were mediocre writing at best, and did little actual thinking. I could tell that during the process of composing the post, the writer didn’t push any new boundaries or agonize over just where to place that word. But then the comments start coming back, “What a great post,” “beautifully written,” “you should get a prize for best blog post of the year.” And then the respondents go off on their own thoughts on the subject.

I figure that what the audience is really responding to are the ideas and impressions that crop up in their own heads while reading the post. Then they attribute the interesting thoughts they had to the prowess of the original writer.

And then, often, the comments become much more interesting than the post that started it all.

The audience is definintely in control in the blogosphere.

I wonder if Ong and the others you have cited are aware of the dynamics of blogs?

However, I have to admit that I’m skeptical about the audience doing much besides buying writing when it comes to paper publication. I’ve only done a smidge of paper publication and I can say that for the most part, if I had an audience, they have been silent.

Writing for paper publication is a completely different prospect than writing for blogs is. If you haven’t gone through a change while you’ve written, if you haven’t agonized over where to put that word, if your work hasn’t been disarticulated at the hands of an editor, you haven’t written anything worth the work of publishing. I think that is a very personal matter and very much in the hands of the author.

I think that the more interesting relationship between authors and audience is in television and film. Writers now (for good and ill) are exposed to a lot of feedback about characters, story lines etc. This is especially the case with television series.

I don’t know of any instances where writers have made huge changes to plot lines as the result of audience feedback (most of it via the Internet, of course), but I have read several interviews where writers have said that reaction caused them to discuss things.

And there have been several instances where the writers have written shout outs and nods to their fanbase into a show.

Here’s an interesting example of a writer talking about the audience reaction to a story line on the television show Gilmore Girls:

“And even in our writers’ room we had a lot of heated discussions about whether that’s going to hurt the character and all that stuff, but Amy and I felt like that’s where she would go, that’s where her heart would go, that’s her own flaw, because it wasn’t the right thing to do. And we followed through on that flaw.”