Another gem from the NY Times

I get a pared down version of the New York Times delivered to my email everyday…for free. While I’d like to read every article everyday, that just doesn’t happen. Usually, I read a couple articles, but on the weekends I am able to peruse the “paper” in more depth. On this crisp, October, Sunday morning, I found one of those gems I not only needed to read thoroughly, but just begged to be held out and shared.

Michael Cunningham grabbed me with a few foreign words right away, appealing to my gut level desire to know more about this mysterious world and its inhabitants. Sure, I know a few words in Armenian, but I primarily think about the world from an “English-speaking” perspective. Other languages are a curiosity to me and Cunningham seems to know that about his audience.

His article, “Found in Translation,” then explores how the first words of a novel need to “speak with authority to our readers” and I’ve often felt the import of that first line when writing and when reading. Whether it’s M. Scott Peck’s terse “Life is difficult” or William Saroyan’s glorious “One day back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every imaginable kind of magnificence, and life still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room,” — an opening line that makes the brain take notice is key to the book being read.

Sometimes it seems like a NY Times article is just written specifically for me and this one goes on to look more closely at audience and purpose. He says,

“I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.”

Cunningham then comments on the multitude of options we have as readers, saying

“What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that (other stuff) for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.”

I recently had a former student look me up on facebook. Her writer’s voice (and personality in general) was such that I remembered her instantly though it had been almost 20 years. She lamented that her writing hadn’t progressed much since those days. And that she felt she had been writing to me…so that when I wasn’t there her audience was gone. I encouraged her that it wasn’t too late to begin a blog or find another audience. My hope is that my current students have many more options for their audiences. And that they find a way to grab that reader right away, give that reader something worth his or her time, and maybe even inspire that reader to add to the ongoing, grand conversation — the new, ever-changing world in which we live. Thank you, Mr. Cunningham and thank you, New York Times.

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