One challenge that often plagues writers is a natural default to express only personal interests. Quite often, writers write because there is something in their percolator they want to get out into the world. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But, if writers are not careful, what they create will not be relevant to their readers.
The key to effective culture-making is, at least in some part, understanding value creation. And real value creation is born out of personal connection with the community for which writers write.
Now, I’m not suggesting writers “sell-out” for the market. That’s the left ditch on the side of the road toward value creation. I’m suggesting writers need to understand their readers and keep the needs, dreams, and pains of their readers in the back of their minds as they create. That way writers don’t fall into the ditch of irrelevance that happens to be on the opposite side of the road toward value creation.
Simply put, writing is not just about self-expression, per se, but about creating value for readers. And value creation is one of the important stops on the road to culture-shaping, which is, as it so happens, an important stop on the road to human flourishing. In order to do this effectively, writers have to know their readers in order to create meaningful art, which in turn, shapes the culture of their community for good.
First, a brief word about art. To be art, it is often said it must be superfluous. In other words, in the classical understanding of beauty, art cannot be useful or it ceases to be art and becomes something else, like propaganda or utility. A beaver’s dam may seem interesting and even beautiful as part of a natural landscape, but ultimately, it is instinctive and useful. It is not superfluous, excessive, and unnecessary like a painting or poem about the dam that invites us to contemplate it. Art is not useful in its primary cause. It is beautiful, and therefore, contemplative. How modern art can be beautiful then is a discussion for another day, but for now, we need to return to exploring the question of writing as art and value creation.
If writing is a kind of art, how then can it be useful without ceasing to be art? If we are not careful with this question, we can fall into the trap of thinking like Oscar Wilde and his ilk that topics of writing like virtue and vice are just materials for art. But they fall into another kind of ditch, one we call “art for art’s sake.” This ditch has an opposite, too. This ditch is Andy Warhol and his ilk, who believe art is ordinary and so anything can be art, including an advertisement poster of Marylin Monroe or an empty Campbell’s Soup can.
So far we have a lot of ditches and we don’t seem to have traveled very far. So let’s answer the question about the relationship between write, art, value creation and culture-making.
Art of any kind is born out of imagination, and imaginations expand and grow as a result of cultural awareness. But creating art tends to turn back upon the culture and influences the culture it was created out of. While this is true of all art, it is quite evident in the area of literature, the stories the culture tells itself.
For a story to be meaningful, whether it be a fictional or non-fictional narrative, the reader and the writer must share some common ground, what we often call cultural literacy. The human experience is intrinsic to this relationship. That’s why a successful writer will not only work out of his or her own personal experience, but out of a shared personal experience, if you’ll allow me to introduce a novel phrase. A shared personal experience has as part of its leaf-mold (to borrow from Tolkien) an understanding of the readers’ needs, dreams, and pains because of a shared human experience and to some degree, a common cultural literacy.
But there is something else just as important that goes with this: writers not only need to know their readers, they need to know things for their readers. Mortimer J. Adler explained that a good writer elevates his readers by giving them something to reach for. If a reader is reading something that he could have said himself, he gains nothing by reading the writer’s words.
I could sum this all up by saying, good writers don’t just redistribute information, they create value for their readers, readers they have some share personal experience with.
Seth Godin, a modern marketing and book guru, speaks to this indirectly in Stop Stealing Dreams, when he addresses the significance of reading and writing in education. He says,
In the connected age, reading and writing remain the two skills that are most likely to pay off with exponential results.
Reading leads to more reading. Writing leads to better writing. Better writing leads to a bigger audience and more value creation. And the process repeats.
Typical industrial schooling kills reading.
Among Americans, the typical high school graduate reads no more that one book a year for fun, and a huge portion of the population reads zero. No books! For the rest of their lives, for 80 years, bookless…
But reading is the way we open doors. If our economy and our culture grows based on the exchange of ideas and on the interactions of the informed, it fails when we stop reading.
On this point, Seth’s right. Healthy progress comes from the exchange of ideas and the interactions of the informed. When a society stops reading, progress stops. But I would add that the progress of a society is impeded also when it stops reading well–when it stops reading the most important books.
So here’s the takeaway: writers stop creating value for their readers when they stop reading, or even when they stop reading well. And that means value creation for readers starts with the writer creating value for him or herself by reading well and reading a lot for themselves and for their readers.
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