To Entertain or not to Entertain:
Hello again--I’m back.
If you read my last post you’ll know that I had given ten reasons why I was starting a blog. The number one reason was to entertain. I can’t say that this is an original idea of mine. The fact is, I’ve read it in at least two different books on writing.
The first book, ‘Stein on Writing,’ was writen by the legendary editor and author Sol Stein. This book helped me decide that I wanted to try my hand at writing. I came upon it quite by accident on Audible’s website. I found the book fascinating and have listened to it at least twenty times. I found some of his teachings to be of things that I’d noticed before in my own reading, while others I’d never thought of before, but they made perfect sense once he mentioned them. One of the things he talks about—I believe it was him—is that the purpose of writing is to entertain. It seems a self-evident motivation for reading a book, yet for some reason we seem to forget this point when we start to write. We seem to become self indulgent, writing only to satisfy our own wants instead of that of our audience, a clear case of intellectual masturbation.
In his book, Stein tells of asking students why they want to write. Their answers are quite telling. Some say they write to ‘educate,’ others that they write to ‘express themselves’ and still others that they have ‘something to say.’ Just a cursory glance at this short list and a stark communality leaps out at you. They all, in one way or another, speak only of what they, the writer, wants and they ignore the desires of their reading public. I think this quite normal for almost any human being. We seem to be pre-wired for self interest. Be that as it may, I think Stein makes a salient point when he says the purpose of writing is to entertain the reader. That is why the reader is buying your novel after all. They want to be entertained. Randy Ingermanson, the second author/teacher that I’ve read who makes this point, says that the reader is looking for ‘an experience that is more interesting than what they can get in real life’ ie…they want to be entertained. He goes on the state it more plainly later in his lessons on the subject, but I don’t feel like going into that right now.
So that is why I listed ‘to entertain’ as my number one reason. Quite noble of me, don’t you think. Of course this does beg the question, do I write only to entertain…yes…and no. It is true--as much as I hate to admit it—that I am also human so it would be safe to assume that I am just as guilty of being self-indulgent as the next person. More than some, I would say and less than others. But is this a bad thing. Don’t we all want to ‘educate, express ourselves and say what is important to us? Of course we do! And that’s perfectly alright, just as long as it is also entertaining, other wise we won’t sell many books now will we? After all, even Ayn Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged book has to be one of the most overt attempts at message based, writing, had to entertain her readers before spreading the word. We must entertain our audience or we might as well save all the effort and stuff our manuscripts into a dark drawer marked ‘For my eyes only.’
There is however another reason to make entertaining your audience a top priority—it’s just plane fun. I think that we can all agree that in the effort to entertain others, we also entertain ourselves. I don’t know about you, but the most fun I have is when I come up with something especially clever or funny and finding others who find it cleaver or funny too. That just makes my day.
