The question is, who do you hope will read your writing?
Serious readers. Literate readers. People who care deeply about literature. And those not so serious readers who want to expand their horizons, or stumble onto my work by accident, and decide to keep reading. Which may be a small group relative to the entire universe of readers, but large enough for me.
What reaction, if any, do you hope to invoke?
Depends on the story - with most of the topics I chose, I deal with them in a realistic way that relies on the subtleties of living, designed to increase a readers awareness rather than drive home a point. But I will always be concerned with expanding the consciousness of my fellow Americans in general with the unsensationalized parts of the African American community - the fathers who are good role models, the problem of class consciousness between blacks, the new civil rights paradigms, and other topics that are concerned with the darker brothers sense of self and identity within this nation. Black writers have been concerned with identity since Clotel. Unfortunately, there is still a need today for this kind of dialogue. So I shall continue the tradition.
Do your expectations of the reader change with each piece?
Hard to say. I look at it as an exchange - I am going to give them something Ive created. I expect a reader to give me something - to engage their intellect for a few moments.
Satire, a form I indulge in from time to time, demands the most of a reader. So for those pieces I expect that an even smaller group than usual will appreciate the experience.
Do you care what the reader thinks, or how the reader reacts, or not?
Why else would you do this? To be a writer, you have to think that your opinion, or your point of view, is important, because it's your personal take on things are going to color your writing. My job is to convince the reader that they can trust my opinions, and believe in my characters. If I do a good job, the discoveries those characters make should be profound enough to stay with the reader. If I do a great job, it should hit readers in their guts, and affect the way they see the world around them.
Kris Broughton on Southern writers
I'm behind anyone who can write about the south without leaning on the imagery of cornpone and Cooter to tell their story.
Kris Broughton on the black writers paradox
The conundrum I seem to be facing as a writer is how to tell my stories in a manner that is true to the subject matter, and the motivations of the characters, without having to also educate the mainstream reader about a cultural viewpoint that is different than theirs.
A lot of immigrant literature is almost always part travelogue as they take their supposed mainstream target reader on a journey through a foreign state of mind.
I have run into the same problem myself, even though I was born here in America, when these same readers are unable to square the subtexts of the black culture I am writing about with their own worldview.
Kris Broughton on why he writes fiction
My main objective is to deliver a great storyline (at least that's the goal each time I start something new) that incorporates issues or elements that are important to my own community and to me as a black man. Maybe that makes me a race writer, but in real life, we dont live in a color blind society. My blackness matters.
Questions derived from "email communications and web postings at various workshops", per the author, this date.
