Writing as Performance

Monday, June 8, 2026

I’m organizing my thoughts about audience and writing (and a little bit about presence & aging) by writing blurbs about writing. I think about why-write a lot. It’s also linked to singing. Both give me pleasure—as well as something to do. The novel is a bit more difficult. I don’t have any serious reason for writing one. I know a publisher, so I might get it published, but I don’t care an awful lot about that. If I cared about readers (being read), I would put more effort into making an audio book out of Viajando—still in my mind a bit. But not very seriously. I wasn’t going to pay someone 2000 to make an audio of it—just to get a few more listeners.

I have to push the words out with a novel, I suppose because I am being someone other than me. And I have to think of readers a bit—like about what makes a good story. So why do I bother doing that?

I think it’s a bit of a residual desire to be known as someone who can tell a good story. A little deeper, to add an identity layer to my name—actually, to be someone other than who I am. Or perhaps, more than who I am. That’s what I meant by that poem, Not that I not always am. Public identity lies somewhere in that space where you really are not. That’s a little closer to why at my age, I am bothering to write a novel.

When I was younger, let’s say in my 40s, there were other edges to my motivation. When I was younger, I wanted to be a novelist. Now I just want to pretend to be a novelist. But really, I’m just a writer. That’s about as close to the truth as I can get.

Then there is the issue of money. I could graph that: from a student, to a high school teacher, to a college professor, to an economically secure retired professor. Essentially, the more social prestige I had, which was aligned with my salary, the less I wanted to be who I wasn’t. Being retired, I have a kind of vestigial prestige, maybe a shadow prestige, like a penumbra, and I write mostly because that’s who I am—or that’s the way I discover who I am, very much the way I write in a diary.

I might put this on Substack in a couple of days. I know I’m wearing my readers out.

Why I write is very much why I sing—to myself. In fact, writing and singing to me are twins. I write for a while; then I pick up a guitar and sing (with Lola [my dog, if anyone other than me is reading this]) for a while. I go back and forth. And this is my pleasure in the day.

In fact, when I wake up, generally at five, I think for a while and then get up because I want to go downstairs, make coffee, and start writing—which I do for a while, and then I pick up a guitar and sing. They are very much the same thing. Because I am as old as I am, I really don’t need an audience to read or hear me. I like having one, but I don’t need one. It wasn’t at all like this when I was young. I have just described one of the pleasures of age. I’m going to “work” a bit on my novel now, then go play pickleball and then see what happens with the rest of my day.

Writing to be read and singing to be heard is performance. That again is a shadow self.

I might write a bit more about audience a little later: how audience and how one writes shifts with genre. That’s enough thinking for this morning.