On what we do
A re-introduction of sorts
The question of genre has haunted me for long. I’ve had numerous inconclusive debates about it with Amod who seems to be not bothered about it much. It took my structure-obsessed mind some thinking and some failed attempts at writing ‘in a genre’ to conclude that genre is something that emerges after the writing is done. It is indeed something to not worry about.
Recently a friend told me that our positioning is all over the place which is absolutely correct. This is exactly what a good marketer would say. More specific the positioning, easier it is for the readers to know what to expect, and hence the chances of them signing up increases. In a busy Indian market, you’ll always find shopkeepers shouting the names of specific items they sell - belts, shoes, shirts, pants etc. You rarely see a shopkeeper shouting ‘why don’t you come into the shop and see what we sell and then decide what to buy’.
It’s all true but what if there is no common theme that runs across every piece we write? What if, in the writing process, we get to know the theme only after the first draft is done? And more importantly, what if this little discovery we make while writing is something we enjoy the most? This is a risky approach. Whatever emerges from this writing process might not fit any pre-defined positioning, let alone a specific one.
Of course, there is a trade-off here. If we want to continue writing the way we want, our positioning will always be off and we might not be able to shout in the digital market the specific name of the item we are selling. This is where you come into the picture, dear reader. The responses we get from you convince us that you relate deeply to what we write, regardless of the genre, theme, subject etc. We would love for you to share this newsletter with your friends and family if you think they would also find it engaging.
I am aware that a generic positioning is equivalent to no positioning at all but still let me give you something as the answer to the questions like :
‘What is Mehfil?’ - It is a weekly newsletter
‘What to expect from this?’ - You can expect an engaging reading experience
‘About what?’ - About literature and music. There’s also humour pieces. And also, curated song playlists and poem-lists
‘Not clear, can you give some examples?’ - Sure. Please click on the links below to read.
The struggle to genre-identify one's newsletter is all to real. I have face this issue with my own newsletter, over the past two years. Describing one's writing is almost as difficult as the act of writing itself!
The ideal scenario (borderline fantasy, in fact!) is to have an audience that reads you no matter what you write. But until we earn that, I suppose we have to keep finding ways to best describe what the reader should expect. And perhaps the iterations of those descriptions/ tags/ bios/ captions can help distil our own idea of what it is we *want* to write.