Ayn Rand's Audience

[fight4thefuture]

In a 1974 interview to The New York Times, J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, said, "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Today, he lives in seclusion. He has not published a book since 1965. Although he has written much since then, he keeps his work locked up in a filing cabinet. He doesn't want the publication process to distract him from his writing.

I remember reading that after Ayn Rand finished Atlas Shrugged she no longer knew who her audience was. This was one of the reasons why she stopped writing fiction.

I don't understand it. I agree that a writer needs to know who they are writing for, but why couldn't she just write for herself?

[BaalChatzaf]

In a 1974 interview to The New York Times, J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, said, "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Today, he lives in seclusion. He has not published a book since 1965. Although he has written much since then, he keeps his work locked up in a filing cabinet. He doesn't want the publication process to distract him from his writing.

I remember reading that after Ayn Rand finished Atlas Shrugged she no longer knew who her audience was. This was one of the reasons why she stopped writing fiction.

I don't understand it. I agree that a writer needs to know who they are writing for, but why couldn't she just write for herself?

Wouldn't this be analogous to consciousness be conscious only of itself?

It would be like an orator holding forth only to hear his own voice.

Sounds like an exercise in futility.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Newberry]

In a 1974 interview to The New York Times, J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, said, "I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." Today, he lives in seclusion. He has not published a book since 1965. Although he has written much since then, he keeps his work locked up in a filing cabinet. He doesn't want the publication process to distract him from his writing.

I remember reading that after Ayn Rand finished Atlas Shrugged she no longer knew who her audience was. This was one of the reasons why she stopped writing fiction.

I don't understand it. I agree that a writer needs to know who they are writing for, but why couldn't she just write for herself?

Hey Julian,

I have a friend who is a great sculptor, and she has made several life-sized and a few monumental works. One over life-sized work took her a year of total saturated 24/7 focus. No social time, no weekends, no beers out with friends--just the full force of creating a masterpiece. She was living alone in an empty section of a building in NY, no heating on the weekends. She made a very passionate and beautiful work. I am quite certain that it took every ounce of strength, and every second of focus she could summon.

I believe she sold one of the edition, which paid for her efforts--and that is it. No critical praise from knowledgeable people. She is now married and takes some time to enjoy her family life. She could not both create that work and take time to share with others. She can do smaller less demanding works, but not the full on major works. For those she simply gives everything she has and has nothing left for anyone.

Artists like that need an equally intense and intelligent audience, anything less simply saps their energy. She told me that she couldn't, at this time, attempt another major work.

Something like this could be one factor in Rand not completing another major work of fiction.

Michael

Edited May 23, 2008 by Newberry

[Newberry]

It has been ages since I read Barbara and Nathaniel Branden's bios on Rand, though I think they both discuss Rand's depression in the aftermath of finishing Atlas Shrugged.

Edited May 23, 2008 by Newberry

[Barbara Branden]

Julian, I don't really believe that any writer writes "just for himself." When one is writing, there is always, in the back of one's mind, the awareness of one's intended readers. For example, if I were writing a children's book, my writing would be geared to the age group, their general interests and level of understanding, that I expected would be my readers. With Atlas Shrugged, Rand expected her readers to be intelligent laymen (as well as professional intellectuals), and the intellectual level of her writing clearly indicates that she has that audience in mind rather than, say, an audience with no knowledge of American history and culture and no interest in ideas. But when she wrote Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, her intended readers were not the general public.

If a writer were marooned on a desert island and somehow he could know with certainty that he never would be rescued, he might write down his thoughts and his feelings at times, in order to keep himself busy and to clarify his thinking. But I doubt very much that he would write a carefully crafted children's book or a book about technical ohilosophy, or any self-contained and ambitious work.

I cannot know why Salinger hasn't published for so long a time, and I'm not calling him a liar about his motive. But I do think he's mistaken in his identification of the purpose of his writing -- or of anyone's writing -- when he says that it's for himself alone. A writer wants to please himself first and foremost, but he wants to please himself by doing the best job he can in the context of a work aimed at a particular group of readers.

Barbara

[Laure]

Barbara, do you think part of the reason for no more fiction after Atlas Shrugged was the feeling that there's no way she could "top" that? I remember reading that some Apollo astronauts felt that way after going to the moon. I wish I'd been there to tell her, "Don't worry about 'topping' Atlas Shrugged, and don't worry about not being able to write a story set in the present-day. Why don't you try your hand at science fiction? Wouldn't that be fun?" (My ulterior motive in wanting more Rand fiction to read would be pretty obvious...)

[Newberry]

Julian, I don't really believe that any writer writes "just for himself." When one is writing, there is always, in the back of one's mind, the awareness of one's intended readers. For example, if I were writing a children's book, my writing would be geared to the age group, their general interests and level of understanding, that I expected would be my readers. With Atlas Shrugged, Rand expected her readers to be intelligent laymen (as well as professional intellectuals), and the intellectual level of her writing clearly indicates that she has that audience in mind rather than, say, an audience with no knowledge of American history and culture and no interest in ideas. But when she wrote Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, her intended readers were not the general public.

If a writer were marooned on a desert island and somehow he could know with certainty that he never would be rescued, he might write down his thoughts and his feelings at times, in order to keep himself busy and to clarify his thinking. But I doubt very much that he would write a carefully crafted children's book or a book about technical ohilosophy, or any self-contained and ambitious work.

I cannot know why Salinger hasn't published for so long a time, and I'm not calling him a liar about his motive. But I do think he's mistaken in his identification of the purpose of his writing -- or of anyone's writing -- when he says that it's for himself alone. A writer wants to please himself first and foremost, but he wants to please himself by doing the best job he can in the context of a work aimed at a particular group of readers.

Barbara

Barbara,

This is interesting. Do you write fiction?

Art mediums are indeed different, but I think I would still have great pleasure in painting on a deserted island--simply enjoy bringing the thing about, even if no one were there to see. And, in making painting, I have never considered the audience--yet, I do consider the audience or students for tutorials or for writing criticism.

Michael

Edited May 24, 2008 by Newberry

[fight4thefuture]

Michael -

I guess that didn't occur to me since I've yet to experience anything at that level of intensity. I can relate from the stuff I've worked on, but on a much smaller scale. It must have taken an incredible amount of energy for Ayn to write Atlas for a decade. I see how she would have been crushed.

Barbara -

I may be getting a little too into semantics, but is it possible to differentiate between to and for?

i.e. I am writing to you, but I am not writing for you. You are the direction of my motive, but you are not my motive; I am my own motive.

[Barbara Branden]

Barbara, do you think part of the reason for no more fiction after Atlas Shrugged was the feeling that there's no way she could "top" that? I remember reading that some Apollo astronauts felt that way after going to the moon. I wish I'd been there to tell her, "Don't worry about 'topping' Atlas Shrugged, and don't worry about not being able to write a story set in the present-day. Why don't you try your hand at science fiction? Wouldn't that be fun?" (My ulterior motive in wanting more Rand fiction to read would be pretty obvious...)

Laure, I believe that was a part of the reason, but she didn’t really want to attempt a book that would top Atlas (a feat she considered impossible). She said that what she wanted was to write a pure action story, with the philosophical meaning expressed only through the implications of the events; that, to her, seemed like pure pleasure. But when she tried to project that kind of story, she realized that her disgust for the culture left her still paralyzed."I no longer know to whom I'm addressing myself when I write," she said. "I no longer know where are the intelligences to which I've always addressed myself. I feel paralyzed by disgust and contempt."

It was the events following the publication of Atlas that had made her doubt the existence of rational minds. But she was not referring to the horrible reviews, so many of which distorted her ideas, nor to the reaction of the public – for some time, the sales were so painfully slow, that it looked as if the book would fail. She was referring to the absence of any defense of her in terms that made sense to her. In a talk I gave to The Atlas Society two summers ago, I said:

“It was a soul-shriveling reward for the writing of Atlas Shrugged. The book motivated so many others to reach for the best within them, it instilled in them Ayn’s romantic vision of life’s possibilities and her passionate idealism. But where were those whom she had inspired now, when she so desperately needed them? Where were the voices of the men of ability defending her, as she had given her life to defending them? Where were the minds that understood what she had accomplished, and had the courage to name it publicly and to fight for her, as she had always fought for them? Where were the creative heroes to tell the world of her great achievement and demand that it be recognized, as she had told the world of their achievements, Where were the heroes to say to her, as she had said to them: 'Yours is the glory.’ She was drowning in a terrible, endless silence.”

“It was a disaster from which she never fully recovered.”

In The Passion of Ayn Rand, I explained that I believe, although Rand did not say this, that there were still other important reasons for her depression and her writing block. She was physically, emotionally, and intellectually exhausted after the savagely intense effort which had lasted from the first idea of the novel through fourteen years. And still more relevant was the fact that, at the age of fifty-three, she had completed her life’s work. In John Galt, she had created, to her complete satisfaction, the ideal man, the figure who had been the source of her decision to be a novelist. Her motivation to write fiction was gone. She had done what she had set out to do and now there seemed nothing worth doing. She could not conceive of a hero greater than Galt, and she had no wish merely to present variations on Galt.

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

Barbara -

I may be getting a little too into semantics, but is it possible to differentiate between to and for?

i.e. I am writing to you, but I am not writing for you. You are the direction of my motive, but you are not my motive; I am my own motive.

That doesn't quite name it, Julian. Rand's motive in writing was to create her concept of the ideal man, And to do so she wrote a novel addressed to rational minds. But you are correct in saying that she was not writing for her audience; she was writing for a purpose of her own.

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

Michael Newberry:

"Barbara,

"This is interesting. Do you write fiction?

"Art mediums are indeed different, but I think I would still have great pleasure in painting on a deserted island--simply enjoy bringing the thing about, even if no one were there to see. And, in making painting, I have never considered the audience--yet, I do consider the audience or students for tutorials or for writing criticism."

I do write fiction, Michael. Stay tuned.

I can fully understand that you would paint on a desert island. And a writer might enjoy thinking up plots for novels on a desert island.

You say that you never consider the audience. But do you not have an audience in mind? And when you publicize your work, do you not try to reach that audience? That is, you expect to be seen by people capable of appreciating your work. I do not mean that you tailor your work to them as separate from fulfilling your own standards, but that you hope to reach them. If you thought that the world was composed of half-wits incapable of responding to good work, you'd feel as if you were on a desert island, and I believe that that would ultimately effect the effort you were willing to put into work that would never be understood or appreciated.

Barbara

[Chris Grieb]

To all who have contributed to this tread. Thank You! It is wonderful to see great minds at work.

[BaalChatzaf]

Barbara, do you think part of the reason for no more fiction after Atlas Shrugged was the feeling that there's no way she could "top" that? I remember reading that some Apollo astronauts felt that way after going to the moon. I wish I'd been there to tell her, "Don't worry about 'topping' Atlas Shrugged, and don't worry about not being able to write a story set in the present-day. Why don't you try your hand at science fiction? Wouldn't that be fun?" (My ulterior motive in wanting more Rand fiction to read would be pretty obvious...)

Atlas Shrugged was a dystopian work. It showed the world going to Hell in a handbasket. They way one tops dystopia is with utopia. The logical follow up to Atlas Shrugged would have been a novel about the rebuilding of the United States (including last ditch efforts by the Bad Guys to prevent the rebuilding) and what life might be like under a truly free economy and a just government. The problem is that utopias are never quite as "interesting" as dystopias and this hypothetical book would probably not have sold as well as did Atlas Shrugged (how does one outsell a book that nearly outsells the Bible?).

If you look at the closing scene in Atlas Shrugged ("we're going back"; trace out dollar sign in the air) you could infer that Ayn Rand thought the rebuilding would proceed apace with little or no disruption. I am not so sure the rebuilding would have been all that easy and smooth. I think it could be accomplished but it would take years. It took 200 years (or so) to destroy the United States in the Atlas Shrugged universe. It makes sense to assume it would take decades (at the very least) to undo such damage.

Maybe Ayn Rand did not have the energy to construct the rebuilding in the same detail as she described the end game of the undoing.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

To all who have contributed to this tread. Thank You! It is wonderful to see great minds at work.

I hope I'm not too late! Opps, my mind isn't working yet!

--Brant

[Newberry]

I do write fiction, Michael. Stay tuned.

Break a leg!

You say that you never consider the audience. But do you not have an audience in mind?

When I create, people simply dissolve out of my consciousness. Though, when I paint I listen to music I love--so there may be some connection to an "audience" there, but it's nothing like a clear thought: "I think X would love this work, or Michelangelo would be proud of me. "

And when you publicize your work, do you not try to reach that audience? That is, you expect to be seen by people capable of appreciating your work. I do not mean that you tailor your work to them as separate from fulfilling your own standards, but that you hope to reach them.

It's kind of funny, but this is the first year I even figured out what kind of person collects my work. What I found out is that they generally are people that have expertise in their fields, and in their field's history; appreciate clear and creative thinking, make money, and care deeply for family and friends. Previously, I would just put out my work in public, like fishing blindly in the big sea, and see what happens.

If you thought that the world was composed of half-wits incapable of responding to good work, you'd feel as if you were on a desert island, and I believe that that would ultimately effect the effort you were willing to put into work that would never be understood or appreciated.

That is a difficult series of thoughts. And, I am not sure how others face some of their creative problems. But I have a kind of spiritual spark--sometimes I feel it for people, but mostly, its connected to artworks I love, and I have that feeling when my artworks "click." If there is no "click," it wouldn't matter if a million people loved it--I would feel sick inside. So I just keep plodding through problems until that magic point happens. Perhaps that "spark" is something like "holding an audience in mind?"

Michael

[Barbara Branden]

Michael N., you wrote: "I have a kind of spiritual spark--sometimes I feel it for people, but mostly, its connected to artworks I love, and I have that feeling when my artworks 'click.' If there is no "click," it wouldn't matter if a million people loved it--I would feel sick inside. So I just keep plodding through problems until that magic point happens. Perhaps that 'spark' is something like 'holding an audience in mind?'"

Michael, I'm fascinated by this, because I could write: "I have a kind of spiritual spark -- sometimes I feel it for people [and I often feel it for music], but mostly its connected to writing I love, and I have that feeling when my writings 'click.' If there is no 'click,' it wouldn't matter if a million people loved it -- I would feel sick inside. So I just keep plodding through problems until that magic point happens."

Yes, that spark is "holding an audience in mind." But the audience, in this case, the most important audience, the one above all to whom one's work is directed, is oneself and one's own judgment. And the "click" means: It's right -- it's what I wanted it to be!

Barbara

[Barbara Branden]

Michael N., you wrote: "When I create, people simply dissolve out of my consciousness."

Agreed. But notice that I wrote, "When one is writing, there is always, in the back of one's mind, the awareness of one's intended readers." I didn't mean that one is consciously thinking of one's audience or viewers in the process of working; that would be an impossible impediment (except, perhaps, for a Peter Keating). I meant only that one has an intended audience. So that, to use a somewhat stretched example, if you're struggling to get a color precisely the way you want it, your work is not directed to colorblind people; but had you accepted an assignment to paint for the red-green colorblind, that would influence your choice of colors.

Barbara

[Roger Bissell]

When I'm playing a trombone solo, whether it's improvised or just straight melody, I always have in mind my ideal audience, which is myself. I simply mentally put myself in the audience -- kind of an out-of-body experience, in a way -- and I activate my improvising with the simple question: what would I like to hear right now? It usually works quite well.

But sometimes there's a catch or a complication of this approach. If I'm playing jazz in a clinic setting for high school or college kids, I imagine myself as a young person who does not have a highly sophisticated palette of harmony or melodic complexity, and I try to "communicate" with myself as that young person. This helps me connect with younger listeners, yet still be creating for ~myself~, rather than to please others.

When I'm playing jazz for and with my peers, I don't limit my musical "vocabulary" that much, but I follow the same general pattern, putting myself in the listener's place, so to speak.

When I'm writing an arrangement or a composition -- whether its for a concert group or a jazz band I play in -- I write it according to the standard of: what would I like for me and my colleagues to play on this tune? What would I like to hear us play?

Obviously, there's more to it than that, because each song or melody has its own specific characteristics to be brought out or transformed, and a meaning to be conveyed. And ~those~ are some of the specifics that enter into my decisions (sometimes split second) as to what I would like to hear me/us play at this moment or that point in the piece. But the projection of myself into the audience is what guides my imagination in what is presented.

REB

[Barbara Branden]

Roger: "When I'm playing a trombone solo, whether it's improvised or just straight melody, I always have in mind my ideal audience, which is myself. I simply mentally put myself in the audience -- kind of an out-of-body experience, in a way -- and I activate my improvising with the simple question: what would I like to hear right now? It usually works quite well."

"But sometimes there's a catch or a complication of this approach. If I'm playing jazz in a clinic setting for high school or college kids, I imagine myself as a young person who does not have a highly sophisticated palette of harmony or melodic complexity, and I try to "communicate" with myself as that young person...."

Interesting, Roger. It makes sense to me, and it's a variation on what I've been saying: that one does have an audience, viewer, reader, listener, consumer, etc., somewhere in one's mind. And that you cannot please yourself unless you make what you're creating available, in the sense of understandable and graspable, to that audience. It's relevant that at times you must alter the "you" -- in terms of age, development, understanding -- according to the audience you are addressing.

I'm turning my Efficient Thinking lectures into a book. I had to know, even before I began the writing, who is my intended readership. It's not grade school readers (or myself when I was in grade school); and it's not PhDs in philosophy (or myself with the Ph D I don't have), although I hope some of them will find it of interest. It's the general public -- or at least that segment of the public that has completed high school and is interested in new ideas relevant to their lives and goals. Therefore, the book must be different in many respects than the original lectures: concepts must be explained that did not require explanation to an Objectivist audience; references to Rand's writings must in many cases be omitted, in others explained; issues relevant to complex metaphysical and epistemological theories must be omitted and/or simpified. I could not please myself if I simply published the original lectures and expected a readership wider than Objectivists.

Barbara

[Philip Coates]

>It's [for] the general public...concepts must be explained that did not require explanation to an Objectivist audience; references to Rand's writings must in many cases be omitted, in others explained; issues relevant to complex metaphysical and epistemological theories must be omitted and/or simplified.

Barbara, I'm glad to hear that you are refocusing it in that way. It might be of greater value not just to the general public but even to Objectivists to have things put in simpler form and without Objectispeak (or with that terminology recast or explained).

[Philip Coates]

On the other hand, books on thinking often tend to be disordered grab bags of too concrete steps or too narrow in their application (e.g., books on thinking which is taken to equal "problem solving" or "critical" thinking or "creative" thinking). And the very broad Objectivist concepts, such as focus and floating abstractions and thinking with a purpose and thinking in essentials, while they can be harder to grasp and apply, still can't be simply omitted, I believe.

It's possible to be too abstract or too concrete in a book about thinking (...well, that's true in a book about anything I suppose, but still worth stating).

[Philip Coates]

On the third hand, I don't really like the title "efficient" thinking. Efficiency is only one aspect of what good thinking should aim at.

[Barbara Branden]

Phil: "The very broad Objectivist concepts, such as focus and floating abstractions and thinking with a purpose and thinking in essentials, while they can be harder to grasp and apply, still can't be simply omitted, I believe."

Not only won't they be omitted, they and number of related issues will be central to the book, as they were to the lectures. And properly explained, they are not at all difficult to grasp and apply. That's precisely what I most enjoy about non-fiction writing: taking complex ideas and breaking then down into elements that are easily graspablle. I've always been convinced that if I cannot explain something simply, it''s because I don't fully understand it (which principle, by the way, I'll be explaining in the book).

I'll also be discussing, in at least a chapter, the nature of creative thinking. which I did not touch on in the lectures. But it's an area that fascinates me, in part because it is so different in many ways than other kinds of problem-solving. Especially during the writing of The Passion of Ayn Rand, I had one eye on my own mental processes, and I've since spent considerable time talking to other writers, and to painters and musicians and sculptors etc., comparing what they do in the process of creating with what I do. What I've found, unsurprisingly, is that there are great similarities in those mental processes, and I've tried to extract some basic principles from the concretes.

A number of years ago, I wrote a novel which I naively struggled to create using the methodology of ordinary problem-solving. I found it was an excruciatingly difficult and unfulfilling process, which gave me (with some exceptions when I stumbled upon a better methodology) almost none of the joy I felt most of the time while writimg Passion.

Phil, you say you don't like the title, "Efficient Thinking." I don't, either, and certainly not for a book aimed at the general public. So here's a standing invitation to all OL people reading this: If you have any suggestions for a title, please post them here. The winner of the contest -- if there is a winner -- will receive the much-coveted Barbara Branden award, which consists of dinner with me at West Hollywood's fabled Chez Hamburger Hamlet.

Barbara

[Roger Bissell]

Hi, Barbara, Phil, and all. Several quick comments:

1. I just finished transcribing lecture 9, with only one more to go. And I am as excited and curious as anyone can be to see what you, Barbara, are going to do with these lectures in your updated, expanded version of the material.

2. As for creative thinking, I do think that problem-solving and creative thinking involve a lot of the same general kinds of processes, including giving your subconscious "standing orders." Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation, one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time, argued for a common ground between such disparate fields as humor, artistic inspiration, and scientific discovery. He said that "bisociation" between two previously non-united areas of mental content was the key to creativity in general.

3. A title for the book? I'd have to see the manuscript, or a good portion of it, first. But based on where I think you're headed, Barbara, it seems to me that you need to get across the idea of "Thinking for Life," or "Thinking Well," or "Think as if Your Life Depends on it -- because it does!" Something like that. Stress the survival value of psycho-epistemology, in other words.

Ah, we live in wonderful times, with more excitement just around the corner! :-)

Best to all,

REB

[Newberry]

... I've since spent considerable time talking to other writers, and to painters and musicians and sculptors etc., comparing what they do in the process of creating with what I do.

Ah.

If you have any suggestions for a title, please post them here. The winner of the contest -- if there is a winner -- will receive the much-coveted Barbara Branden award, which consists of dinner with me at West Hollywood's fabled Chez Hamburger Hamlet.

Nice incentive, how about: Thinking. It is simple and to the point, like Martha Stewart's Entertaining.

Michael