So a lot of times when I write poems,
I become very overwhelmed with the idea of the reader,
and I think it gives me writer's block a lot of the time.
So it was mind blowing to hear you say that you
weren't thinking of the reader.
Is there any technique you know of,
or is that just how you write?
I don't know.
I mean, what are some good exercises to banish the reader?
I mean, of course, all writers are going to think
of-- because it's like, there's a part of us--
when you're writing, it can be a rebellious act.
It's both a rebellious act, but it's
also an act where you're kind of seeking approval, too.
So that part of you that's seeking approval
is thinking about the reader and thinking
about audience and so forth.
And I think that's important to do,
and I think that's important to think about, also,
if you're thinking about writing politically.
You're thinking, who am I privileging?
Who do I want to write to?
And so forth.
But really, in terms of being really, really free,
you have to just completely exorcise the reader
from your mind.
And I don't think I would have been able to write Dance Dance
Revolution if I was thinking, well, who's going to read this?
Because if I were to think this while I was writing it,
I would probably realize that no one would read this,
and then that would just stop me from writing it.
But I think just know that the riskiest,
most ambitious writers who also failed a lot of times
but who are remembered are writers who probably just
didn't think about seeking approval and writing
for a reader.
I was reading this one article.
Who was it?
Christopher Hitchens, Dave Eggers.
And I don't know if I entirely agree with this,
but it sounds a little overly grandiose.
But one thing that he said was, if you're writing,
you should write as if posthumously.
You shouldn't think about trends and so forth and just
think about what you really need to get done and said
and so forth.
It's scary, but it's also much more freeing.
And your writing is so much better for it, too.
We have time for one more question.
I'm not sure if I'm going to come to a question yet,
but what I was thinking about when I read Dance Dance
Revolution, I had picked up also the Cloud
Atlas about the same time.
So there's that middle part of the Cloud Atlas where
it's kind of a new language, also, or an amalgam language.
And what I was thinking as I was reading
them was that this was kind of like authors
just showing off linguistically, like kind
of a linguistic guitar solo, for a really long time,
and I didn't know how I was going to connect to it.
And so I'm wondering, in your experience
of writing like that, what have you learned
about how you are able--
because in both the books, eventually, you
develop this connection with the speaker emotionally.
And I wonder maybe what you learned
in writing this on how you're able to convey
a connection with the reader when you're playing around
with language in this way that actually makes it harder
to make that connection.
That's a very good question.
And there are a number of ways I can answer that.
I mean, in one sense, I feel like maybe I'm
putting words in your mouth, but you're
talking about difficulty, I mean, in a sense,
because with this jumble of languages,
it's hard to kind of clearly connect
to the characters at first.
I'll say, first of all, for me, writing something
like Dance Dance Revolution or playing with dialects and so
forth, for me, it's natural.
I was saying this earlier today.
I grew up in a bilingual background,
so this sort of mixing and matching different languages
was something that felt sort of natural to me.
And that felt very natural to me.
And for me, when I read poems, the first kind of poems,
the poems that I was introduced to,
these very heartfelt, personal lyric poems,
I couldn't connect to it, and these were poems
that you were supposed to easily connect to.
And I was like, but the confessions
that were being made felt inauthentic.
So I think there are different ways you can connect.
But to answer it from a different point of view,
I mean, Lyn Hejinian was talking about language of inquiry.
It was in her book, The Language of Inquiry,
and she was talking about closed texts versus open texts.
And she talks about just the way we're used to reading
and the way we usually-- especially now when
we're just clogged with blog entries and just everything.
We have to just sort of digest everything really
quickly and make an immediate connection.
And so yes, you make an immediate connection,
but then you forget.
And then she talked about open texts,
and an example would be, you could say, Cloud Atlas,
my writing.
I think of someone like, say, Tender Buttons, Gertrude
Stein, where she plays with syntax,
and it's seemingly incomprehensible.
So there's much more, so you have to work.
You have to work to understand it.
But because you have to work, there's more,
and you can give up and be frustrated and so forth.
But there's more of an interactive relationship
between writer and reader, and because there's more of an--
and where the reader is forced to make
his or her own interpretations and so forth.
But that kind of writing, for me at least,
makes much more of a lasting impact
because I'm using the effort to kind of understand and decipher
and pronounce and so forth.
And sometimes, I would just give up.
Then I'd come back to it.
I mean, I've read plenty of poems and fiction
where I just kind of gave up and then came back to it,
and I understood it and so forth.
I didn't set Dance Dance Revolution out to be like that.
I just wrote it because I felt like I had to write it,
but that's my kind of own understanding and respect
for writings that can be--
other poems that can be indecipherable
because it's polyphonic or because it's
sort of difficult in some way.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
Cathy, thank you so much for your amazing performance.
[APPLAUSE]