The need for an audience.

Yes, this is another more essay like post. A good reason for that is that I am feeling some pressure in my academic career, and thus I am running out of juice. However, I have been thinking about some things and I feel I could write down these ideas, and hopefully it will spawn discussing among my readers.

As I have mentioned before, I study literature, and part of that is drama. Plays are interesting in a sense since what we read on paper is never the whole story. The “whole story” only begin emerging when the play is produced and presented to an audience. This, in a way, seems quite obvious. You need a stage, actors, and an audience for a play to reveal its full meaning. Having read a play by Claude Gauvreau, and seen another one of his plays, this becomes blindingly obvious: a play’s meaning is hidden in the actors’ performance. Or at least it seems to be that simple. In fact, the play being a collaborative work, its meaning is created by the way the actors portray a character, the way the director envisions the play, the way the author wrote it, and finally, the way the audience reacts.

When looking at my writing, I often comment that I have one or two readers, and while it might seem funny, this is what I believe. I am writing these stories and text for the people I pretty much remind that I have a blog. Truth is, without readers these words can’t really have any meaning. I can’t force people to read this. (I can try, but I would lose friends fast.) All I can do really is hope that I get good enough that some of you will mention this to your friends and so on.

So, why do I need an audience?

First of all, I would like more reactions. I am not writing this for the sole purpose of being entertaining. I want to help refine and define my approach as a writer. I can achieve that through feedback, feedback I can only get if people read this. But I can’t really go spamming my link everywhere, because I still don’t feel confident enough in my “craft” to share it with complete strangers.

I guess it’s another case of this ambivalence I always have. I want to get better, an audience would help me, but I don’t feel good enough to have an audience. I can’t really get out of this.