When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.
The relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal in a way. We co-create each other. We are constantly emerging out of the relationship we have with others.
I think most people write from what they see in their own world, which is maybe why we so often see an African-American woman as the best friend, or the one you bring in when you need some sass. It's like we're put in a box.
It's so much easier to write for a person in your life than to write for some imagined readership, so you write something that's more intimate and true.
When I write, I lose time. I'm happy in a way that I have a hard time finding in real life. The intimacy between my brain and my fingers and my computer... Yet knowing that that intimacy will find an audience... It's very satisfying. It's like having the safety of being alone with the ego reward of being known.
If I think of a reader while I am writing, the only reader who really matters for me is my wife. It's most important to me that she likes what I write.
It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.
Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.
I write about emotions - falling in and out of love, finding what you want to do, no matter where you are or who you are. I think that's why people feel connected.
I would say that in my black readership, more of my readers tolerate the horror aspect of my work, you know. 'I don't usually read this kind of stuff, but.'
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