The Grasshopper #31: Seduction
As a writer, it’s your job
I just love this subject, the idea that we must seduce our readers. Though it sounds exotic, seduction is actually the most important thing you can practice as a writer. Your title must entice, your opening lines must offer the potential for intimacy or action, and then you must tease, reject, embrace, and eventually seduce.
And then, ideally, leave them wanting more.
Come on inna my house, if you dare
Oh, the joy of it when we read a first page and realize we are being courted, that a writer will serve us temptations and mysteries, rage and passion. But, when you offer up these promises you must deliver, or your story will be shelved, unread. As so many are.
How is that for a challenge? To shed shyness and boldly take a chance to reinvent yourself as a seducer, all while tapping away at a keyboard or scribbling words with a pen. Readers get to live vicariously through their reading, but writers also live vicariously by telling those stories, by making up those stories.
What a power you take on by writing words and creating worlds.
As I write this I think, Martin, you are being melodramatic. You’re pouring on the schmaltz, and yes I am, but this is the essence of why I write, to seduce strangers with a made up world and made up lives.
I think the really accomplished writers and artists in general are aware of this responsibility to take readers out of their lives and into another place. If you are not aware or haven’t considered it this way, consciously observing your writing as seduction can help you understand the visceral level that great writers work at.
I always find myself thinking back to the same examples. Gatsby, a shadowy figure on a dock gazing at a green light across a bay. The English Patient, silent, wrapped in bandages, and not even English. A count who is very good at buying champagne (Hemingway).
Or in recent reading, Joan Didion’s grief in A Year of Magical Thinking. You want to hug her but she wouldn’t have it.
All of these examples are power writing and that power comes from their seductiveness, the thing that immerses you into the story until when you set the book down it is as though you are coming up for air.
The really interesting thing about this is that you, as the writer, must be seduced by your own words before they seduce others. I think this is why we write, to introduce ourselves to something in us we suspected might exist but seldom see in real life.
Have you ever consciously seduced someone?
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you may have noticed that I see writing as a somewhat mysterious process, especially as you get deeper into it. This poses a problem for me when writing about writing and creativity.
To accomplish something like the seduction of a reader, you cannot think too much about what you are doing. It’s a paradox that is only solved by the writing being an actual seduction, something you are doing because you truly want the reader to be drawn in, and to share your vision of the world.
In other words, it has to be sincere. You might say you have to seduce yourself as you write. To me the seduction is my taking pleasure in the flow of it, and the way the unexpected enters and surprises me. That surprise is one of the great pleasures of both writing and reading.
If this all seems too new age-y or melodramatic, I need to make clear that it applies equally to fiction and nonfiction. They are both stories and stories are a form of seduction. In a political piece I may lay out facts and express outrage or frustration or even, glee, at the events I describe. These emotions are all ways to bond with a reader who may share those same responses to an event.
For example, after hurricane Ian laid waste to a vast swath of Florida, I wrote an article questioning the viability of rebuilding in a region where destruction like that could be a regular event. Apparently many readers shared that same frustration with the logic of rebuilding in a danger zone. But there was something seductive going on in that writing and I tried to understand what it was when the piece went viral.
I think it was the choice of words to describe the extent of the disaster contrasted with the logic of my argument for changing our response, the old Einstein quote about the definition of insanity being repeating the same actions and expecting different results.
But I can’t be sure why something resonates or why it does not. Another paradox. Which makes me wonder if this topic of seduction is even useful to learning to write. I do know that as a reader I want to be sucked in, to lose myself in a story.
Maybe I’m just thinking too much.
We are entering what may be my least favorite time of year. Short days, cold and gray weather, the joy and weight of the holidays. I wait for the winter solstice and then start counting the seconds, then minutes of light added to each subsequent day.
This year, I started getting up before sunrise so I can experience all the possible light. And, to my surprise, I’ve developed a new habit as a result. I find myself writing early in the morning, often even before my first cappuccino. This is a pretty big change for me, but there is something about getting immersed in writing and looking up and seeing those first glimmers of orange in the bare trees, a little everyday magic.
I have this crazy idea that I may visit some of the climate-worn places I have written about in the past few years, Florida and Southern California. I need to see the effects and talk to the people. I’m not a journalist, but it’s time for me to get some first hand experience in seeing the places that were hit.
A part of me is afraid that this might stink of voyeurism, of gathering experience from the suffering of others. In November 2019, I took a train across the US, a trip I initially saw as a test of traveling and writing away from my home base comfort zone. But that trip quickly became about observing the extensive state of homelessness in our cities and along the tracks that pass through the backsides of America.
These are the hidden urban places and I found them full of people you’d never see except from a passing train, especially in coastal California, at once idyllic and looking westward, now with people living in those hidden places.
That was definitely not a vacation, but it was an experience that informed my writing. And this was before Covid.
My subject in this issue, seductiveness, would not seem to apply to the dark topics I often feel compelled to address, but seduction must embrace the dark and the light, just as in life.
Once again, thanks for sharing a little of your time with this writer and my ideas. M
1218 words
A little extra something
Itsy, bitsy
Do you know what an itsy is? It’s when a writer gets their ‘its’ and ‘it’s’ wrong. Grammatically it is one of those oddities that probably trip up nonnative English writers. ‘It’s’ is used when you can replace the phrase with ‘it is’. ‘Its’ is the possessive, which is the opposite of the usual possessive using an apostrophe S.
Confused yet?