Between the Lines: Before There Is an Audience

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes on the private life of making, the need to be seen, and the freedom to create without an audience in mind

There is a particular kind of freedom in writing something that nobody is waiting to read. I have often wondered whether it is the most honest part of the writing process, that stretch of time when a thought is still finding its shape, when a sentence can lead us somewhere unexpected, when we can follow an idea for pages without having to explain what we are doing or where we intend to take it. The page receives everything with a generosity that the world rarely offers. It allows for hesitation, excess, contradiction, the occasional absurdity. We can begin again, abandon a paragraph, write something embarrassing, change our minds halfway through a sentence. There is no one to impress, no deadline for approval, no imagined reader waiting to decide whether the effort was worth their time. For a while, the work belongs to the quiet and unobserved territory of the self.

I wonder how much of this territory we have surrendered in our eagerness to be read.

Writing has always carried the desire for an audience.

The writer who says otherwise may be practising a particularly elaborate form of modesty. We want our words to travel, to find their way into another person’s life, to be recognised and remembered. There is a deep pleasure in discovering that something we have written has touched a stranger, that a thought which seemed private has found an echo elsewhere. Publication makes this possible. It gives a piece of writing a life beyond the person who made it, and the journey from manuscript to reader has long been part of the literary imagination. For generations, that journey had its own intervals. A writer worked in relative solitude, submitted a manuscript, waited for an editor’s response, endured revisions, rejections and the slow business of finding a publisher. The audience was somewhere ahead, at the far end of a process that required the writer to spend considerable time alone with the work.

The distance has changed. We now inhabit a world in which the making of a thing can become almost as visible as the thing itself. A writer shares the photograph of a desk, a page from a notebook, a word count, a difficult morning, a small triumph over a stubborn paragraph. The book is announced long before it exists and its progress becomes a story in its own right. Social media has made it possible to build a relationship with readers while the work is still taking shape, and there is something genuinely valuable in this exchange. Writers find communities, encouragement, conversations and readers who might otherwise never have discovered them.

The solitary business of writing can feel less isolating when there are people who understand its peculiar rhythms.

I sometimes wonder what happens to the work when the audience arrives too early. When we know that our writing will be seen, discussed, measured and responded to, does some part of us begin to write towards that response? Do we become more conscious of what will hold attention, what will invite approval, what will make someone pause while scrolling through an endless stream of other people’s lives? The imagined reader can be a useful companion, but an audience that is always present can become a rather demanding houseguest. It occupies the room even when we are trying to think. We begin to anticipate its preferences, its impatience, its silences. We may find ourselves explaining too much, arriving at conclusions too quickly, smoothing out the oddness that might have made a piece of writing distinctly our own.

There is a difference between wanting to be read and needing to be seen while we create. The former has accompanied writers for centuries; the latter is a more recent condition of our public lives. We have become accustomed to documenting the process, to making our work visible in stages, to offering evidence that something is happening even when the only thing happening is the slow, unphotogenic labour of thinking. A writer sitting with a difficult chapter for three weeks has very little to show the world. There may be no announcement to make, no progress to report, no satisfying photograph of a finished page. And still those weeks may contain the most important work: the reconsideration of a character, the discovery of a voice, the gradual recognition that the story has been moving in the wrong direction all along.

I have always felt that writing requires a certain amount of unobserved time. It needs room to be uncertain, to wander, to become something other than what we first imagined. Some ideas arrive fully formed and ask only to be put down, while others remain obscure for months, sometimes years, revealing themselves in fragments.

A writer must be allowed to follow them without constantly wondering whether they will make sense to someone else. There are sentences we write simply to understand what we think. There are pages that exist because we needed to write them, even if they never find their way into the final manuscript. There are characters who accompany us for years and eventually disappear. The work is full of such private transactions, and their value cannot always be measured by what survives into publication.

I think of the many notebooks that must exist in drawers and cupboards, filled with beginnings that never became stories, observations that never found an essay, poems written in a moment of feeling and never shown to another person. There are unfinished manuscripts that have outlived the circumstances in which they were conceived, stories abandoned because life moved elsewhere, and pieces of writing whose only audience was the person who needed to write them. We tend to speak of these as failures or unfinished business, as though the absence of publication has left something incomplete. But there is a life of making that exists independently of the life of the finished work. A thought can change us even if it never becomes an argument. A story can give shape to an experience even if nobody else reads it. The act of creation has its own intimacies, and some of them are lost the moment we begin to imagine how they will appear to others.

This is not an argument against ambition, publication or the desire for recognition. Writers need readers. Books are made to enter the world, to encounter other minds, to be interpreted in ways their authors could never have anticipated. The pleasure of being read is real, and there is no reason to pretend that it does not matter. We write in languages inherited from others, draw upon stories that have travelled across generations, and participate in a conversation much larger than ourselves. Even the most private piece of writing carries traces of the world outside it. But the work needs a period in which it can be free from the obligations of that world, when it can exist without having to be useful, appealing, marketable or immediately comprehensible.

This is where the distinction between making and sharing becomes important. We have begun to collapse the two, as though the value of a creative act becomes visible only when it is received by someone. A photograph is posted, a poem is shared, a painting is displayed, a book is announced. The response arrives in numbers, likes, comments, shares, reviews, sales. These measures can offer encouragement, and they can also become an unsteady substitute for the more difficult business of knowing whether the work has become what we hoped it might be. The temptation to look for confirmation is understandable. Creation is full of uncertainty, and the response of others can briefly relieve us of the burden of making our own judgement. But there is a danger in allowing that response to become the measure by which we decide what deserves to be made.

I wonder, too, whether we have become less patient with the idea of making something simply because we are drawn to it. A person can paint without exhibiting, sing without performing, write without publishing, cook without photographing the meal. There is pleasure in doing something well, and in doing it repeatedly, even when the result remains within the small circle of one’s own life. Children understand this instinctively. They draw entire worlds on sheets of paper without wondering whether the drawings will find an audience. They invent stories whose only purpose is to keep the game alive. Somewhere along the way, many of us learn to ask what the work will become, who will see it, whether it is good enough to be shared. The questions are not unreasonable, but they can arrive before the work has had a chance to breathe.

I find myself returning to the image of a writer alone with a page, unaware, for a few precious hours, of the world beyond it. There is no performance in this image, no romantic insistence that the writer must suffer in solitude. It is simply a reminder that creation needs a certain freedom from observation. We need to be able to make things that are clumsy, excessive, unfinished, even foolish. We need to write a sentence that goes nowhere and discover, three pages later, that it was taking us somewhere after all. We need the liberty of not knowing what the work is worthwhile we are still trying to find out what it is.

I would still like my writing to be read. I would like it to find the people for whom it might mean something, to travel beyond the boundaries of my desk and become part of another person’s thinking. But I hope I never become so occupied with that eventual encounter that I lose the pleasure of the encounter that comes first: the one between a thought and a page, between the life I have lived and the life I am trying to imagine, between a sentence I cannot quite find and the moment it finally arrives. That meeting is private, sometimes difficult, often exhilarating, and it asks for nothing beyond my willingness to stay with it.

The audience may be waiting somewhere ahead. The work, however, must first be allowed to find its way into the world without having to look over its shoulder. There should be room in our lives for the things we make and never show, for the stories that remain in notebooks, for the paintings that stay on our walls, for the words that were necessary simply because we needed to write them. We do not have to turn every act of creation into an announcement. Some things deserve the freedom of being made before they are asked to mean anything to anyone else.