ars poetica
introducing the use case
“I hope my work provides inspiration for a person to do today what they couldn't do yesterday, no matter what it is.” Noah Purifoy
Teddy Wayne does an interview series for Lit Hub called “Lit Hub Asks: 5 Writers, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers” featuring five writers with upcoming books. The last question is always the same: “How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?”
I really fucking hate this question.
If you have a book coming out soon, you obviously think that somebody has an interest in reading it, and in the question’s terms, you are inherently hubristic.
It’s like asking, “How do you handle being such a prideful piece of shit?” There’s no way to answer the question and remain congruent with its position without insulting yourself. And if you disagree with it, you risk coming off as overconfident and prideful—hubristic, that is. A double bind isn’t really an interview question. It’s an attempt to force compliance with a worldview, in this case that writers should be ashamed of themselves for thinking they have anything worth saying.
When I was asked this question, I said: “I try to write with the awareness that a person could be doing anything else but read this book. But, I also think everyone has something worth saying.” (How Miss America of me!)
What I wish I had said is: Fuck you.
I’m aware of the possibility that this question is phrased in a provocative fashion to get writers to say something interesting in defense of our shared art form. And, generally speaking, I think we should be able to advocate for what we do. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a hazard to acting as if literature is so important that we don’t need to describe what it does for us: the meaning vacuum can be filled all too easily with a cult of personality. So I’m in favor of writers being able to articulate why someone could and should pay attention to our work. Maybe the idea here is that you’ll get a better answer out of someone whose back is up against the wall. You probably will!
But the thing that sticks with me—and it’s taken me a while to find it in the tone of this question—is that Wayne isn’t really asking why books are worth reading, including all writers in this obligation to articulate our purpose. He’s asking why anyone should pay attention to you about anything. Anything! Jeez. To me, interest is an awfully low bar to clear. I often find myself weary of my fellow humans, but everyone is interesting on some subjects some of the time, sometimes in horrible ways.
But then again, that’s my disposition. I find everything interesting because I believe there’s a way of regarding everything and everyone with a kind of curiosity which makes them worth observing. That’s life. That’s why I like being alive. I think it’s only possible to be bored by someone if you’ve already decided that you know everything about them—which is really a problem with the observer rather than the observed. Asking someone why they have the temerity to think they’re interesting to others is just a way of expressing doubt that anyone is worth paying attention to, and that’s such a cynical question that I don’t think it’s really worth answering.
Which is why I love Kimberly King Parsons’ answer to that same question:
The stories people tell have saved me over and over again. I carry Amy Hempel’s words around in the folds of my brain. Jack Gilbert, Lydia Davis. But I’m equally compelled by what the Lyft driver or the deli guy said, or something I overheard in an airport. I’m infinitely interested in lives, voices—the odd singularity of experience. Is it so outlandish to think my take might be worth something too?
Hell yes, KKP! Such a graceful and generous answer—far more generous that this question deserves, in my opinion.
As far as hubris goes, it’s actually way more self-centered to imagine that, in a world of books that have held great meaning for others, yours is the big exception.
“I’m not like everyone else in the world—I’m worse” is hubris. “The world is boring and meaningless by default because I say so” is hubris.
The thing that sucks so much about that LitHub question is that it pretends to be audience focused, but really, it just conflates the writer’s self—the magical, quicksilver self which is too precious to describe, much less sell or promote—with the purpose of the writer’s book.
To be clear: Just because everyone is worthy of interest doesn’t mean that everyone can manage to make an interesting book. Being is being; rendering being as a book which has a stable enough structure to allow the reader to carry meaning in it is a skill. Being able to promote your work means that you recognize and can describe what kind of structure the book is, what kind of meaning the reader might be able to carry in it. It’s well enough to say that you’d rather “let the art speak for itself,” but when you do, you’re presuming the audience will want to listen to the art speaking in the first place.
If we can’t say what our art is for, we can’t really ask anyone else to look at it without presuming to some self-centered degree that people should check it out because it was made by us.
Maybe this attitude arises out of an exhaustion caused by productivity and purpose. That would certainly make sense. It is exhausting to be bent toward productivity and purpose at all times. There are many forces in the world that demand you make sense to others, to yourself. To be legible, to be a good person, to have a good reason for doing what you’re doing. Don’t just sit there. Don’t play with the bones. Put that down, put that back, read the instructions before you fill out the form. Etc. We are socialized into sense-making. Writing often has at least some degree of anarchy to it. A refusal to make sense, maybe, or the determination to make sense in an unsanctioned way.
But the refusal to make sense can be what your writing is for. And in that case, your writing is useful for others for whom the obligation to make sense in a certain way has flattened some keen and beautiful part of their being. Your writing is useful to them because watching others be free frees them in turn.
Writing can be useful in many, many ways. Cheering up a sick friend is a valid use for writing. Skewering a fascist regime is a valid use. Telling a ripping yarn that distracts someone from their anxious mind is a valid use.
From here on, I’ll invoke the term “use case” to describe what your writing is for, what it does. Use case is actually a programming term; it is “a description of how a user interacts with a system or product.” This encompasses an understanding of the system’s goals and preconditions, the users who will interact with it, and the various ways those users will flow through the system.
I’m not sure exactly how I adopted this term to think about readers and books—probably I glommed onto it during my time as a product taxonomy analyst at Google, where I got to use all kinds of analytical wonk words (form factor! was always my favorite). But I think it’s kind of cool because a book is a system whose function is determined at least to some degree by the way a user interacts with it. And when you think about it that way, you get to focus on the user and the system rather than your self.
We will explore this idea at depth, and you’ll leave with a strong sense of your idea use case, audience, and method. But to start, I’d like you to collect a little raw data on the reader you know better than anyone else: yourself.
Assignment
I. I want you to think of your five favorite books of all time.
Be absolutely honest: you are not going to show this list to anyone, and you don’t have to use it to prove anything about yourself or your good taste. The more dead honest you can be, the more this exercise will help you.
For each book, give yourself a moment to sense what that book has done for you. (By “sense” I mean, just sit there and feel into it.) Then write down the answers to these questions:
What space has it opened up for you?
What has it allowed you to see that you couldn’t see before you read it?
Were you a different person on the other side of the book, and if so, how were you different?
What could you do after reading it that you couldn’t or wouldn’t do before?
If you had to produce those same effects and changes in yourself without the use of a book, how would you go about it?
Just to be gauche—how much money would it cost to replicate these effects?
II. Go to the library and bookstore. Do your normal browse, but observe yourself and note the visual qualities of books you gravitate toward.
What kind of covers do you tend to pick up?
What colors and fonts draw your attention, and what do they communicate?
What promises do these designs make?
III. Optional: If you’ve had a book released, take a look at the cover and ask yourself all of the questions from part II.
That’s all for now! Next time, we’ll take some of this information and explore different kinds of use cases.
Questions? Thoughts? Drop them below! XS