If A Scream Is Not Heard, Does It Matter?

If a writer screams in the wood and no one can hear him, is it merely an auditory expression or a noise others can hear?

Writing is a weird profession. The origins of story-telling involve people around a campfire describing what had happened to them; at some point people figured out that they were not just limited to factual retellings and began telling actual stories. That is, our stories evolved as our mastery of language did; we went from “Thag killed tiger” to how the killing of the tiger was a metaphor for how the leader of the tribe over the hill needed to die and how Thag was going to do it.

However, then the audience participated in the telling, and the storyteller took cues from them. That is, even before he started telling his story he read the audience in order to determine what kind of story the audience was looking for and as he was telling the story he was observing the reaction to his story and adjusting it as he went: If the audience reacted well to sex and gore those were emphasized, if the jokes were a hit those would be made bawdier and more exaggerated.

That is, there was a link between the storyteller and the audience that made the storyteller a vital part of the community. This is why bards were considered “holy” and why a good storyteller can always get some free food, drinks, and shelter.

Ironically, the written word began an interesting evolution of storytelling. While it originally allowed for better communication between the writer and actors, eventually the writers realized that that they could write things down and thus have stories for later. In a literate society this meant that those stories became s valuable as gold; after all, this meant the stories could be read at any time rather than relying on the writer.

This would also result in the devaluation of the writer. Unlike in a pre-literate society where a storyteller was a living resource, a collection of the stories and history of the people, a writer was just another skill, an artisan who worked in words as opposed to clay or metal. He was no longer as valuable as that which he created.

As time went on the writer and his audience would be further separated. While the stories got better, as the stories became more elaborate and generally richer, there became a divide between the writers and the audience. The writer no longer needed the audience for input, and so they believed that they could writer whatever they wanted; writers were allowed to write whatever they wanted. This was not necessarily a bad thing; this meant that the writer could concentrate on writing and less on the audience. Thus, writing again experienced new levels but the writers forgot about the audience.

This means that we've hit a weird point writers have forgotten that we need an audience, just like any other artist. In fact, a lot of other artists have forgotten that writers are artists because of that separation. As writers we need to get back in touch with are audience, and thanks to social media we have that as an option. Writers have forgotten the value of feedback, and that can cause us to forget that what we're creating has value to society as a whole rather than to just us. With an audience we are not just an auditory sensation in the woods, but an actual noise that needs to be heard.

With an audience we are creating not just a mere work of art but adding to the wealth of our society. Because of that we need to remember that we need an audience of some sort and that we need to value that audience. After all, when we make noise we need to be heard and if we have no audience then we are just screaming to scream.