Writing for Someone Completely Different from You

Sometimes when I’m writing or revising I try to imagine a reader who has almost nothing in common with me. For example, I’m a middle-class, White, male, educated, senior citizen living in the first half of the 21st century in an urban area in California in the United States, and writing in English. There are cultural and historic references that are self-evident to me and to people like me. For example, I might include in a poem: 

Should I stream that flick on Amazon for $5.99

or walk three miles to the only movie theater left in town?

 

Now, imagine a thirteen-year-old girl reading that line one hundred years from now in a remote village in the mountains of another continent.

Imagine a reader as different from you as possible…

Would she have heard of Amazon? I sure hope not. Even if she reads English, would she know what a “flick” is? Would that girl have a clue whether six 2026 U.S. dollars would be a lot or a little to watch a movie? In a world that almost exclusively uses the metric system, would she know if three miles is a long way or a short way to walk? Will a young person halfway around the world a hundred years from now even know what a movie theater is? I hope so, but I don’t know.  

 

So, what can be gained by thinking of that person completely different from me as the audience? Well, considering that potential reader, I might push myself to go beyond the cultural references of my place and time and social status and think of more universal ways to express myself. What if, for instance, I wrote those lines this way:

 

Should I stream that film for the price of an ice cream cone

or hike an hour to the only movie theater left in town?

 

Using “the price of an ice cream cone” instead of $5.99 means that the reference won’t age, and it’s not geographically specific. It’s also clear I’m referring to a relatively small amount of money. Using the time it takes to walk rather than a unit of distance sidesteps the problem of whether miles will still be recognizable outside the USA one hundred years in the future.

 

As far as the movie theater goes—well, it’s already a disappearing cultural artifact, so maybe that reference should stay as is, since it’s likely going to be even more quaint in one hundred years.

 

But why is it even important for someone completely different from you, living one hundred years from now, to understand your writing? And will that person ever read my work or yours? Well, if you don’t consider that person who is very different from you when you write or revise, it’s probable that many things in your writing will confuse them, and it’s so much more doubtful that your work will engage them.

 

Here’s another example:

 

I took 80 to the second Richmond exit

 

Anyone who lives near me in the San Francisco Bay Area is going to know this means “I took Highway 80 to the second exit in Richmond, California”. But that girl in the mountains of another continent is not going to know that, never mind 100 years from now. She might think the speaker delivered 80 crumpets to Richmond near London in the United Kingdom. So why not make it easier for her to understand and give her more context? I know that’s not as cool as saying, “I took 80 to the second Richmond exit,” but how important is being cool compared to being comprehended?

 

I realize there’s another side to this argument. Specific references to the poet’s time and milieu add color and flavor, and those are crucial to good writing. When we read a Shakespeare sonnet, there are many references that we have to research in order to understand it. He ends his Sonnet 126, speaking of Nature:

 

She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure.

Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,

And her quietus is to render thee.

 

There are references here to an audit and a quietus that have become obscure. I had to do some digging to understand these lines. They basically mean that the beautiful young man Shakespeare addresses in this sonnet may delay the aging process, but Nature will ultimately present a final bill (audit) that must be paid (with a quietus, or money that settles a debt). In other words, time will eventually have its way, even with those who age gracefully.

 

Does the fact that most of us would have to research this poem to understand it mean that it’s not as good as other Shakespeare sonnets? Well, I’m not sure, but certainly Sonnet 126 is not as popular as many of The Bard’s other poems. The obscurity of the references may have something to do with that.

 

I tend to err on the side of making myself clear. I know many writers have other priorities. But as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.”

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Why Ron DeSantis Is Wrong about Western Civilization

In a January 2023 press release, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called for legislation to “ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization…” Some of DeSantis’ ideas were then incorporated in to Florida Senate Bill 266, which passed the legislature and was signed into law by DeSantis in May 2023. What DeSantis’ views and the Florida law ignore is that a university education cannot be complete or true if the curriculum emphasizes only “Western Civilization.”

To begin with, “Western Civilization” cannot be properly understood or appreciated in isolation from the rest of the world. Take one key facet of “Western Civilization”: Christianity. That religion began in the Middle East, and it developed primarily out of spiritual traditions outside the West, including Judaism. In fact, none of the world’s major religions started in Western Europe or the United States, so a university education “grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization” leaves out most spiritual traditions, among so many other things.

Take another example, this one from literature. What could be more quintessential about the literature of “Western Civilization” than the work of Shakespeare? The sonnet structure that Shakespeare used for most of his poems developed in Sicily during the 13th century CE. It was highly influenced by the ghazal, a poetic form created in neighboring Arab lands, a form that dates from the five centuries earlier than the sonnet. Not only that, rhymed poetry like the sonnet didn’t even exist in “Western Civilization” until the Middle Ages—Homer and Virgil didn’t write in rhyme. Western European poets borrowed rhyme from Arabic poetry, and from the verses of the Qu’ran, when Muslim civilization was flourishing in Spain.

Don’t even get me started on Shakespeare and the ridiculous set of laws that conservatives have enacted or proposed to limit drag shows. Do the reactionaries advocating that censorship realize that every female character in a Shakespeare play was performed in the Bard’s time by a man in drag, from Juliet to Cordelia to Queen Gertrude? If you really want to talk about “Western Civilization,” you can’t possibly discuss it without talking about the importance of female impersonators.

Another example: the democratic system in the United States, presumably a feature of “Western Civilization” that DeSantis believes in, was highly influenced by the organizing principles of the Iroquois Confederacy, which date back to the 12th century. To explain American democracy without that context is misleading and untrue.

Not only is it wrong intellectually to view “Western Civilization” in a vacuum, it is also extremely limiting for students. Why should students not learn about many of the world’s religions, philosophies, and cultures, and grow to appreciate the best in each tradition? If those in the West want to understand their own culture in three dimensions, one great way to do that is to step outside it and see it from the standpoint of other societies.

The current right-wing obsession with “Western Civilization” has little to do with education and truthfulness, and everything to do with race. By “Western Civilization,” politicians like DeSantis really mean White culture. The phrase “Western Civilization” serves as a dog-whistle to inform reactionary Caucasians that their interests and culture will be favored under a Republican administration. Not only that, the campaign of reactionaries in the United States and elsewhere to favor “Western Civilization” is scarily reminiscent of the Nazis banning culture that they considered “decadent,” namely any art not created by Aryans.

The Republicans and their allies outside the United States are hawking a myth. “Western Civilization,” like all civilizations, has great strengths and weaknesses, but it cannot have meaning and depth without understanding it in the context of world culture. Why deprive students of the full spectrum of global history and philosophy? By expanding the latitudes and longitudes of our knowledge, we only deepen our understanding of all cultures. And that should be the goal of a university education.

Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Are Poets’ Spoken Voices Part of Their Art?

I recently spoke to a poet who said a surprising thing to me: “I don’t like going to poetry readings. I prefer not to hear a poet’s voice, because once I hear it, I always hear it in my head when I read their poems.” That amazed me, because that’s exactly why I do like to go to poetry readings. I enjoy hearing the poet’s individual and idiosyncratic use of the spoken language.

Can you imagine the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, for example, without that whiny, growly, funny, syncopated, and deeply tender voice of his? Here’s an example of Ginsberg reading his famous tribute to Walt Whitman, “A Supermarket in California.”

Allen Ginsberg

Who can conceive of the poetry of Sekou Sundiata without his soulful baritone, completely as musical as Charlie Parker’s solos, especially since Sekou chose to record and not to publish most of his poems. Here’s Sekou reading his irrefutable and still all-too-relevant indictment of racial profiling, “Blink Your Eyes.”

Or Adrienne Rich’s ringing voice calling out the powerful in her precise syllables, as exact and exacting as her diction and imagery and politics. Here is Adrienne reading her poem, “Diving into the Wreck.”

Adrienne Rich

Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. Do we know what Shakespeare’s voice sounded like? Or Lorca’s? Not knowing their voices allows us the freedom to interpret their poems when they are spoken, just as a ballad singer can interpret “Fly Me to the Moon” her own way. Each singer sings it differently. That’s a good thing.

But even if we know the sound of a poet’s voice, that doesn’t preclude a great reciter from recreating the poem for herself. Think of the Oscar-nominated actor Alfre Woodard reinterpreting the late, great Ntozake Shange’s “Somebody Almost Walked Off Wid All My Stuff” in for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Ntozake was a magnificent reader of her poetry, but that didn’t stop Alfre Woodard from reinventing the poem with her own voice, inflections, and choreography. 

Ntozake Shange

In the age we live in, where recordings can be preserved almost as easily as books, and maybe more permanently, a poet’s voice can be part of a writer’s legacy. And why shouldn’t it? In a way, that challenges writers to read their work more professionally and memorably. Isn't the sound of poetry what distinguishes it from the other literary arts? How sad that we don’t know the timbre of Lorca’s speech, since he lived in the age of recorded sound, but was assassinated before his voice could be preserved for all time. 

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Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Are Correct Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Important for Creative Writing?

I have to confess that I have a visceral reaction when I see creative writers or literary magazines use incorrect grammar, spelling, or punctuation. For instance, I recently browsed the website of a new, online magazine that is calling for submissions for what they describe as “non-fiction.” For some reason, these editors, who aspire to be at the forefront of their genre, don’t know that “nonfiction” has not had a hyphen for at least ten years. Given how easy it is to look up spellings online, is there any excuse for that sort of error?

Did Shakespeare use “correct” grammar and spelling?

How important is it for writers to use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation? Some of us are more particular about these mistakes. Those slips and lapses bother me a great deal. They indicate to me a lack of seriousness and professionalism. For a writer not to use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation is like a would-be lover who dresses up for a date but puts his sweater on inside out.

Maybe I’m influenced by the fact that I make my living as an editor. I traffic in rules of language and usage on a daily basis.

I have to keep reminding myself that the rules for spelling, grammar, and punctuation in English are a relatively recent phenomenon. Grammar and spelling began to be codified in the late eighteenth century. Shakespeare, for example, spelled words differently all the time, and he often made what we would call grammatical mistakes, using phrases such as “more fitter,” or “more sweet.” See the fascinating essay on this topic by Professor Karl Tamburr, “Why Shakespeare Didn’t Know Grammar.”

Not everyone has the same tolerance or intolerance for errors of grammar, spelling, or punctuation, anymore than everyone wakes up on the weekend at the same hour. My biggest quarrel with incorrect usage is that it leads to confusion. That is where rules become more than just conventions. 

Some authors feel as if their work is just the creative side of writing. That’s why they became a poet or novelist or playwright and not a journalist. They sweat the details when it comes to characters, plot, dialogue, imagery, the music of language, etc. “Don’t bother me about grammar and spelling, that’s what they pay copyeditors for.” Yes, but isn’t that a bit like expecting someone to clean up after you? Do I detect a bit of elitism in that attitude?

There are other class and cultural issues here. Those with a more polished education often have a firmer command of the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I find that my students in the large public university where I’m now teaching creative writing are less likely to know these norms than students in elite private colleges, who had more expensive educations.

My mother, Mickey Rogow, was a product of the New York City public school system. She ingrained in me from an early age the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The child of immigrants, my mother learned English as new Americans often do, with an accent, since Yiddish was also spoken in her home. Attending elementary school in the slums of Harlem and the South Bronx, she had teachers from the previous groups of immigrants who made fun of her accent and her mistakes in English. To her, making errors was not simply a matter of academic rules. It was evidence that you might not sufficiently belong to U.S. society, that you were a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, someone with less of a claim to being and remaining American. That’s partly why the rules of English are not just arbitrary conventions to me. They are shibboleths that demonstrate that you are an accepted part of society.

Should we look beyond that somewhat colonial heritage to reject the rules of the dominant culture? I do believe that creative writers have the ability and the right to make their own rules. I love the creative way that Ntozake Shange has invented her own spellings and punctuation to render Black English on the page in a lively and accurate way:

she wuz sullen

& the rhinestones etchin the corners of her mouth

suggested tears

fresh kisses that had done no good

from “one,” for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf

But that’s a different story, when you set out to make your own rules. If your goal is to follow the rules of standard English grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and you fail to do that correctly, be aware that some editors, and some readers, may judge you.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The White Horse in the Coal Mine: Emile Zola and Great Political Writing

Émile Zola’s novel Germinal is often considered his greatest work. The book is certainly one of the triumphs of the movement of ultra-realist Naturalism that dominated much of world literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What interests me in particular about this book is how Zola made the lives of coal miners compelling to readers.

Émile Zola

In the introduction to his English translation of Germinal, Havelock Ellis describes the care that Zola took researching the conditions of the miners: “For six months he travelled around the coal-mining district in northern France and Belgium…note-book in hand.”

Zola starts the novel by recounting the home of a mining family:

Now the candle lighted up the room, a square room with two windows, and filled with three beds. There could be seen a cupboard, a table, and two old walnut chairs, whose smoky tone made hard, dark patches against the walls, which were painted a light yellow. And nothing else, only clothes hung to nails, a jug placed on the floor, and a red pan which served as a basin. In the bed on the left, Zacharie, the eldest, a youth of one-and-twenty, was asleep with his brother Jeanlin, who had completed his eleventh year; in the right-hand bed two urchins, Lénore and Henri, the first six years old, the second four, slept in each other's arms, while Catherine shared the third bed with her sister Alzire, so small for her nine years that Catherine would not have felt her near her if it were not for the little invalid’s humpback, which pressed into her side. The glass door was open; one could perceive the lobby of a landing, a sort of recess in which the father and the mother occupied a fourth bed, against which they had been obliged to install the cradle of the latest comer, Estelle, aged scarcely three months.…

“When the old man comes back,” said Zacharie, mischievously, “he’ll like to find the bed unmade. You know I shall tell him it’s you.”

The old man was the grandfather, Bonnemort, who, as he worked during the night, slept by day, so that the bed was never cold; there was always someone snoring there. 

Zola skillfully depicts the home of a family with seven children, two parents, and an elderly grandfather, living in little more than one room. The name of the grandfather, Bonnemort, appropriately enough means “Good Death” in French. A good death is all these family members can hope for at the start of the novel, since their lives are an endless cycle of backbreaking toil in the mines, little sleep, and no privacy. The family does not even possess a closet or a wardrobe to hang the few articles of clothing they own.

But this portrait, moving though it is, doesn’t quite make the point from an emotional standpoint. As new as it was when Zola wrote Germinal in 1885 to depict the realities of working class life, there is something almost journalistic and impersonal in the description of the family’s home. Even if we could place ourselves in the life of those family members, and even though Zola has given all of them a name and a gender and an age, there is still a certain distance between the reader and that mining family, maybe even an inevitable distance, since the human heart resists the sort of direct and obvious appeal for sympathy that Zola includes in this section of the book.

But look what happens three chapters later, when Zola introduces us to another inhabitant of the mines, the horse that pulls the coal carts:

It was Bataille, the doyen of the mine, a white horse who had lived below for ten years. These ten years he had lived in this hole, occupying the same corner of the stable, doing the same task along the black galleries without ever seeing daylight. Very fat, with shining coat and a good-natured air, he seemed to lead the existence of a sage, sheltered from the evils of the world above. In this darkness, too, he had become very cunning. The passage in which he worked had grown so familiar to him that he could open the ventilation doors with his head, and he lowered himself to avoid knocks at the narrow spots. Without doubt, also, he counted his turns, for when he had made the regulation number of journeys he refused to do any more, and had to be led back to his manger. Now that old age was coming on, his cat’s eyes were sometimes dimmed with melancholy. Perhaps he vaguely saw again, in the depths of his obscure dreams, the mill at which he was born, near Marchiennes, a mill placed on the edge of the Scarpe, surrounded by large fields over which the wind always blew. Something burnt in the air—an enormous lamp, the exact appearance of which escaped his beast’s memory—and he stood with lowered head, trembling on his old feet, making useless efforts to recall the sun.

I don’t exactly know why, but when I reached this passage in the book, I cried. Zola’s  painting of that horse is so unexpected and specific—Bataille’s ducking to avoid the familiar spots where the tunnel is low, the horse’s forgetting of what sunshine is, the cruelty of confining an animal to that space, the bright color of the horse’s coat against the coal. It was through the description of the horse Bataille (which means “Battle”) that I felt emotionally something of the despair of the miners and the stifling world they worked in.

As Shakespeare says in Hamlet, “By indirections find directions out.” By describing the plight of the horse in the mines, Zola makes the human suffering there more tangible. His appeal for sympathy for the horse somehow has more emotional impact because he is not rubbing our faces in the suffering, he is merely showing us a reality and allowing us to empathize. In the passage about the horse Bataille, Zola doesn’t hit the readers over the head with the suffering in the mines. He lets the readers draw their own conclusion that the life of that horse is equivalent to the life of the miners. 

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Has the Best Literature Already Been Written?

It’s very easy to fall into the mindset that there’s not much point in writing anymore, since the best writing has already been written. After all, who is going to write a lyric poem better than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...”? Who could out-do his Sonnet 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme...” so bold in its claim, so democratic in its implications.

The Bard Guy

But imagine if all the writers since Shakespeare had thrown away their quills or pens or clunky manual typewriters with stuck keys and said, “No way I’m going to measure up to the Bard Guy.” Think of the many thousands of works of literature we wouldn’t have, from Wordsworth’s sonnets to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God to Neruda’s poems of surrealist angst in Residencia en tierra? Make your own list. Probably the majority of great literature was written after the Golden Age of Petrarch to Shakespeare was ancient history.

You might still say that the works of even those more recent classic writers I just listed are out of reach now, since our daily speech has declined in the age of texting and singers with dollar signs in their names to the point where we can’t reach the peaks of the literary sublime. Maybe. But what an interesting challenge that is, to try to create a moment of heightened language and emotion in a world where that is not the norm, where new literary classics are as rare as pulling an emerald from the dirt!

Rather than assume that literature has seen its best days, why not think of what literature has not been attempted yet?

Have we melded literature as fully as we can with the other arts and technologies? Heck, no. (Who said that?)

Have we taken literature authentically into the realms of intimacy that have been so private up till now?

Have we written about the new shapes that relationships and families are taking in our world?

Have we laid out the radical equality and justice and sustainability that will allow our world to survive this age of splits—of faiths, families, nations, and atoms?

Yes, there may be a trade-off. We may not be able to duplicate the lacy sounds of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, or the intricate dance of Dante’s terza rima. But we have the benefit of hundreds of years of history and change since Jacobean England and Trecento Italy, change that has given us, I hope, new insights. There are new musics, new asymmetries of elegance to reveal.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer