On the Future of Writing, Letter 5 with Reina Cruz
On the Future of Writing, Letter 5 with Reina Cruz
Audiences, Clarity, and Truth
This is part 5 in a series of letters between reinancruz and me, Zach Roush.
Realms is a sci-fi and fantasy newsletter and podcast taking you to new realms every month! I’ll be sharing my letters here on Realms while Reina will share hers on her Substack Indie Fiction Digest.
Here’s a bit about Reina: Reina Cruz is a writer and middle school teacher from California. She is the writer of the Daughter of Isis series and Marredbury. You can follow her on substack and on her website.
We’re talking about the “future of writing”, which also touches on other things like the future of creativity, how creatives stay creative, and how we do or not keep creating in the face of many obstacles, like AI and visual media.
Subscribe today to catch the whole series! We’ll add links here as we publish more letters.
Thank you for your deeply soulful and, may I say, powerful letter. Our previous correspondences were heady, so it was refreshing that you brought our conversation back to the heart of things. It got my wheels turning. I’m typically not one to land on any “final” judgment about a topic of discussion, preferring to keep my mind open. In this case, I’ll make an exception. I don’t think there is an easy way to future-proof our careers as writers. It’s rote to say that we’re all “making it up as we go”, but we really are, aren’t we? As creatives, we’re called by our vocation to follow our strange logic that combines what our heart wants and what our muses tell us alongside what truths we wish to share.
I’ll admit, too, that I’ve been fairly cynical about being a writer lately. There’s a lot of doomsday and enshitification out there, but that doesn’t mean it has to enter my interior life. As one of my favorite philosophers says, “If you don’t want to be a battery [for doomsday, etc], then unplug.”
I do have things to say about our day and age, though. In my head, I call this time we live in “The Disposable Age,” where our content is as valuable as plastic to consumers and publishers and even, sometimes, we creatives. And this connects to your question on educating consumers (nice Uno reverse, by the way!):
What do you think needs to be done to inform consumers and support the current culture of publishing in a positive way? Do you think we can overcome enshitification?
We need to change how we do things as writers. In the face of this overwhelmingly disposable culture, we need to create work that is indispensable and valuable. I’ll use a common piece of writing advice to build my case:
Write as if your audience were in the fifth grade.
This approach, commonly applied to marketing writing, has seeped into all writing. And this is problematic. The whole world is being raised on dumbed-down, digestible content which can be good for communicating information, I’d say, but is not good for the art of writing. If one can simplify a highly technical aspect of how WiFi works so that more people can grasp the topic, then that’s a great use of the above rule. However, for writing a complex novel like The Grapes of Wrath, this rule does not work. Take the aspect of dialect in this novel, for example, where idioms, double-meanings, and context create enriching scenes.
I think we need, as writers, to be clear and effective at communicating our truth and invite readers to engage more deeply with our creations. This means elevating the work over any writing “rules” or expectations that the world tries to put on us. If a work of writing requires us to write in proper British English from the 17th century, then our task is to make it interesting and clear to our readers. If our characters speak another language entirely, then the challenge is to make them understandable.
I think I’m discovering, as I write this, that the only writing rule that guides me is clarity. I ask myself, Can anyone who understands English read my work and at the very least get the gist? Or does reading my work feel like a punishment? I want the truths I need to share to be a joy to consume - and in my personal practice, I try to make my work joyful for everyone. Not that I dumb a piece of writing down, but that I eliminate issues with flow, grammar, and descriptions. Not that I make all my meanings and metaphors obvious, but that I don’t obscure what I’m trying to say. Readers, more than other consumers, give us so much of their time and energy, and so it should be worthwhile to them. There’s a few helpful questions I ask myself to give clarity to my work:
Is this something I would read?
Is this something I can easily poke logic holes in?
Is this something I can be proud of as time goes on?
And don’t get me wrong, I don’t strive for perfection. I often get to a point, after two or three revisions, where I just can’t see what to improve anymore. And if I’m not meeting with my writer’s group anytime soon, I clean up whatever I’m writing with some copywriting software, and then send it out into the world.
It’s funny, reading this back, I realize that most of what I’m writing is about me and not the “consumer.” And that seems right. This crazy thing we do that we devote our hearts and minds to is not really about our audience. It’s about us in every way: our truth, our ideas, our words, our loves, and our hates. The more we make our writing about us, in clarity and truth, and less about the other (consumers, other writers, corporations, dreams, etc), the more free we are to make the best art possible.
To quote Ursula K. Le Guin from The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy: “...when ‘art is taken seriously by its creators or consumers, that total permissiveness disappears, and the possibility of the truly revolutionary reappears.’”
Meaning, that if we strive to elevate what we do to the highest level, beyond creating something for consumers (although we kind of always have to keep some sort of audience in mind), then our writing at least has a chance to be something more than disposable words on a flat surface; not valuable by any measure of society, which, as an external acknowledgment of our skills will only last for so long, but rather as something we value internally. In the end, it’s not our writing we have to future-proof, it’s ourselves. We need to protect our writing life from being infected by counterfeit experiences (getting rich quickly, hitting the lottery with a bestseller, writing like the “popular” writers, dumbing our work down) and making sure we are internally seeking the highest form of our abilities and pursuing what we’re called to write about.
This quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes to mind, from his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale:
“Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.”
I think what Marquez is getting at is the delicate dance we must do as writers: to accept how the world is but not let it distract us with its counterfeits. Many are tempted away from using their imagination and talents for creative pursuits and instead suffocate them in the pursuit of “happiness.” This is counterfeit because this “happiness” will never scratch that deep itch inside, the one calling us to tell our truth.
The world is always changing, from leaders to consumer tastes, from AI tools to publication platforms, and all of these things and so many people out there are trying to tell us how to be and how to do what we do; the most important thing—as creatives and writers—is to look inward and rely on our muse-instinct-grit to guide us while at the same time acknowledging the true state of the world. We must protect this hybrid acceptance and denial of reality, our strange sort of innocence so that we can create and evolve no matter what happens. Even if AI takes over everything, or in the worst-case scenario, the lights go out, the world will still need us to tell our stories.
To bring it home, here’s what I’m trying to say:
We (creatives and writers) need to meet our audiences where they’re at without dumbing our work down and also invite them into deeper truth and understanding.
We need to know ourselves and know the world.
We need to protect ourselves from the world’s influence—it’s fucking noisy out here.
Is there anything you’d add to this list? Where do you think you’ve landed with our discussions?
Looking forward to your next letter!
- Zach
The next letter will be the last in our series! And then we’re going to do a live video call to wrap up our discussion. It will also be the first time we meet in (virtual) person.
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