Growing up, I gravitated towards all kinds of books. Weekly visits to charity shops would yield weird, wonderful treasures; I could read about fantasy lands one week, mundane yet deeply emotive stories of everyday life the week afterwards.
Sometimes I’d be able to pick a specific book as a special treat, but for the most part I scoured the shelves of charity shops,which often weren’t separated by genre.
When I first started a blog, I wrote about fashion because I loved it. My first media role was as a fashion intern. Clothes, collections and designers were my key interest, but through researching reference points and fashion histories I could learn about witchcraft, ancient craft and obscure, far-flung stories. Fashion was a lens through which I could learn about countless other topics. By the time I’d finished writing some blogs or articles, I’d realised I hadn’t actually written much about fashion at all.
This is how I like to approach writing. Sure, you can pick one overarching theme –– your lens –– but you can go wherever you want from that point onwards. Some of my favourite books are a little bit memoir, a little bit fiction and a dollop of horror. They’re fantasies wrapped up in political subtext and presented as fiction; other times, they’re fleshed-out, semi-fictional depictions of real-life characters.
For me, the idea that stories are boundless fills me with joy. It’s the jolt of surprise that comes from following your ideas to their strangest extremes.
Publishing doesn’t quite work like this.
At the minute, I’m juggling a few half-finished book proposals and toying endlessly with hazy ideas. There’s a lot I want to say, but I can’t figure out how to articulate it clearly. Most importantly, I can’t figure out how to distil the varied elements of these ideas into saleable projects which fit what publishers seemingly want.
‘Who am I writing for?’
This is the question I keep coming back to. In my head, it’s obvious: I’m writing for anyone with a vague interest in my interests. I’m writing for anyone who wants to engage with my work; curious readers who want accessible insight into queerness, sex and whatever topics flit into my brain. But that’s not the answer this question –– which I keep seeing in template book proposals –– actually wants.
What it’s asking is for me to narrow down a demographic; to package ideas with a set audience in mind and think about who will potentially part with their hard-earned cash to buy a finished product.
Writing this way feels weirdly limiting, especially as a queer writer. My first instinct is to say I’m writing for other queer people, to flesh out our histories, which have been burned to the ground. Saying this out loud feels weirdly limiting, and almost counter-productive. Why deliberately set out to write into an echo chamber?
If I say I’m writing for a wider, mainstream audience, there’s an implication that the work has to be palatable. Last year, I worked on an in-depth project which was, very clearly, for a mainstream audience. The word ‘queer’ had to be substituted by softer, less divisive alternatives; words like ‘cis’ had to be laid out in meticulous detail for readers who weren’t used to not being the norm; the fangs of the stories had to be filed down, made safe for an imagined audience of readers desperate for a sanitised product. The whole writing experience was wildly frustrating, not least because these attempts to clean up the final product seemed to do a disservice to ‘mainstream’ readers. How do we know they can’t handle the messy, complicated truths of queer lives? That they’ll be automatically offended or switched-off by anything that’s so specifically queer they can’t instantly relate to it?
Writing for a wider audience doesn’t have to mean pulling punches for the sake of a readership. Some of the best queer books –– Torrey Peters’ The Masker, Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House –– don’t compromise or dumb themselves down, and they’re all the better for it. They blend genres seamlessly, and write with brutal precision about the chaos of queer lives. In my eyes, they’re the gold standard of representation in the sense that their queer characters are imperfect not because they’re queer, but because they’re human.
Now, back to book proposals. I’m overthinking –– that’s the reason this blog exists, to vomit these thoughts and clean them up later –– this idea of writing for a specific audience because my mind can not focus on one theme or idea for any sustained length of time. Writing without a filter sounds like a dream when writing is your day job, but maybe limitations make the end result better.
I’ll get past this hurdle and figure out who these projects are intended for, but the one thing I’ve learned so far in publishing is that you never know who’ll get their hands on your work, and what they’ll take from it. That’s what’s giving me hope right now; that no matter what writers intend, every book is transformed in the eyes of its reader.