Writers, WE are the culture!

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO IMPACT CULTURE

Sometimes, you need to step back to see the full picture. Writers Are Superstars was created to connect publishing to pop culture so we can understand our value and impact as writers. But what does it mean to impact culture? And how does what we do as writers play a role in how culture is defined?

What is culture?

When I say culture, I mean the behaviour and expression of different groups or communities. We’re all one human race, but within that, there are subgroups who define themselves by behaviours and beliefs that are influenced by a number of factors, including geography and historical traditions.

Read my novel Boys and Girls Screaming

From an artistic perspective, we can group culture into several different areas and then break those groupings down even further. In music, there’s hip-hop culture. Diving deeper, there’s trap culture, fashion, battle rap, DJing, dancing, and several other branches that are all tied to hip-hop but express separate and unique qualities.

How do we measure cultural impact?

Trying to measure the cultural impact of a writer or any other art form, on its surface, seems like an esoteric undertaking. But that’s not true. The way we measure cultural impact is by how far a piece of writing, or the writer themselves, transcends literature and is recognized and adopted by broader cultures.

A simple example of this would be a novel being adapted into a film. The original piece of writing has gone beyond its own industry and entered into another realm. That suggests that the story was so powerful, it appealed to a wider audience.

That’s one example. A more nuanced example would be N.K. Jemisin. Jemisin is one of the most celebrated science fiction and fantasy writers of this generation. Her success as an author, and particularly as a Black author, has inspired another generation of young, Black writers to believe that their own success is possible. Her style has been copied, her characters interpreted, and she has sparked conversations that extend beyond any single book she’s written.

It’s similar to my affinity for Toni Morrison. Morrison is the reason I started writing my first novel. Even though I always wanted to be an author, it was re-reading Beloved that gave me the confidence and push to tell my own stories.

Sticking with Morrison, I went to an event earlier this year that was conducted in her name. Hundreds of fans gathered in a theatre to listen to stories from panelists about how Morrison shaped their writing and influenced their lives. For an author born in Ohio in the 1930s to be celebrated by a group of writers in Toronto in 2022 is what you call enduring cultural impact. Toni Morrison will live forever.

Measuring your cultural impact

Those examples just mentioned might feel grand. How do you create pieces that transcend your area of writing? First, you can’t transcend something until you understand where you are. So the first step to measuring cultural impact is defining where you’re operating.

For example, my novel Boys and Girls Screaming is a YA novel; that’s its first grouping. The content of the novel involves the mental health of teenagers; that’s another grouping that can be explored outside of the novel itself. When I visited a high school earlier this year, one of the teachers told me that the kids wanted to start their own Boys and Girls Screaming club. That, my friends, is a measurable cultural impact.

Culture really is the key. And the more you understand culture, the better you can define your own value within it. And that doesn’t mean you compare yourself to anyone. It simply means you know where your work fits and who it’s speaking to. If you can strive for that level of awareness, it will open up so many opportunities for you to expose your work to readers who would be open to your writing.