Guest Author: Daniel Hayes

I'm going to conduct an experiment of sorts this afternoon--Daniel Hayes' people recently sent me an item that he's written which, though it's not directly related to his forthcoming novel Tearjerker, should call your attention to that work anyway...as might reading the first chapter online. Which is as far as I've gotten so far, though I have the galley at hand and am looking forward to digging into it next week... Anyway, here this content pretty much falls into my lap and I figure why not pass it along to you, the reader? So follow the jump and read on, and if you want to see more "guest authors" in the future, let me know.

A Very Strange Form of Intimacy

by Daniel Hayes

1. Every so often, writers are asked if they have an ideal reader in mind.  (John Updike once spoke of a teenage boy in a library, walking the aisles and pulling books off the shelves, more or less randomly, looking for literary adventure.)  And if writers don’t have an answer to this question, presumably they’re writing for themselves—not solipsistically, necessarily, but with the pleasure of expressing themselves, regardless of publication or readership.

When asked this question about audience, I’m always tongue-tied.  And yet I’m very much not writing for myself.  The idea that there’s an inherent pleasure in writing rubs me the wrong way.  The impulse to write—the nagging imperative at the center of my life—is fundamentally exhibitionistic.  I want people to see, to take notice.  And opening your trench coat to the mirror in front of you is only wasted effort.  Publication, with its implication of audience, is crucial to my identity as a writer.

But then who is this audience, my preferred readership—if not myself, if not a teenage boy in the library, if not some sophisticate in a Manhattan café with my book in tow?  Since the question of audience is important to me, why can’t I identify, at least in fantasy, whom I’m writing for?  And without anyone specifically in mind, why isn’t it enough to be writing for my own pleasure and curiosity? 

2. In current psychoanalysis, there’s an emphasis on the idea of recognition.  The term comes, in part, from Donald Winnicott—a British analyst and pediatrician who centered his theories on the needs of very young children for someone to recognize them, to follow them, with eyes or ears or heart.  A simple way of putting it: at a certain age, to be witnessed is to have your self legitimated (or maybe even created).  Winnicott’s idea is that a self can’t really exist without at least the ghost of another—someone who cares, loves, watches over.  If all works right, then a child is eventually able to be alone in the presence of the other.  This paradoxical phrase means that the child begins to incorporate the other (the parent) into him- or herself to the extent that loneliness is not what being alone is about. 

For me, writing is very much a replaying of this drama—an attempt to reassure my self that someone else is around to listen, to read, and to consider my thoughts.  Writing is, after all, a very lonely activity—usually performed in a small room, and almost always by one’s self.  And yet, at the same time, a tremendous effort is expended toward capturing an audience—a group of people who will give meaning to the activity and make it worthwhile.  And therein, for me, lies the anxiety central to any mention of audience: I write out of the worry that there may not be one.

The activity itself—making up stories out of thin air, moving characters around like tiny green soldiers on a bed of dirt—is childlike if not childish.  (This has become especially apparent to me since having a daughter, who often dreams up stories, willy-nilly, making fuzzy the line between fiction and reality.)  There is, in this equation, an inherent risk.  If the daydreamer is successful (i.e., published), then such childlike activity becomes legitimated.  Without success, we’re left with a troubling question: What distinguishes the failed writer from the immature person, stuck on a dream, who lives too much in his head and remains resistant to reality?

All of this—a form of regression—is somewhat embarrassing.  This primitive quest for love is often obscured by, or hidden behind, the tools of the trade, the bravado of authorial confidence, and the stark economic realities of the publishing world.  But why not just come right out and say it?  As a writer, what I do is slap words on the page and then say, “Look, look!”  I say, “This is me, and please love me.”  (And, if things work out, I’ll have readers who’ll say, in one way or another, “How could I go on living without your words?”)  When I say, “This is me,” I’m not referring to any autobiographical content of my fiction, but to the ways that people can’t help but reveal themselves in stories or fantasies—ways that don’t happen at dinner parties or even in a bedroom.  In other words, if you want to know me, and if I want you to know me, then we should probably start with my fantasies, my daydreams, the peculiar way that my mind captures bits of reality and twists them according to its own devices.  It’s like a door opened wide on who I am.

3. The oddity, of course, is that readers, the people supposedly interested in going through the door, are largely anonymous.  Writers and readers are typically strangers.  (When you’re a child, it’s usually mom who comes knocking.)  Writers are people who wish to interact intimately with people who are far away.  And come to think of it, this isn’t such a bad description for readers, either.  Supposedly, in an age where reading is a lost art, cracking open a book is all warm and fuzzy and a sign of good citizenship.  Yet readers, like writers, are folks who like doing it alone.  Reading often qualifies as anti-social behavior; staring at a book makes watching TV seem like a shared experience.

I am not particularly a loner.  I have a spouse, a child, and friends both new and old.  But I also yearn for a different sort of intimacy—the kind that exists between strangers.  These strangers might be two characters in one of my books, or they could also be the reader and me.  I’m assuming a fundamental voyeurism at the heart of reading—a desire to see inside the mind of another without paying too large a price of admission.  Books offer access to a mind, and to an interior voice—an intimate connection that could never happen in movies.  There’s a feeling, in the best reading experience, of being eerily close—sometimes too close—to the narrator or author.  That author was alone when he or she wrote the words, and now you are alone, too, with the book in your hands.  And alone in the presence of another isn’t a bad way of characterizing what goes on when a book is opened, the pages turned.