(NOTE: I originally wrote this in 2009. But instead of back-posting it, as I usually do with old material, Iβm going to leave it up here at the top of the pile, in hopes itβs more visible.)
You are writing a character who happens to be yourself. The only thing the reader can possibly know is what you tell them.
I’ve been meaning to write this piece (or something on its theme) for a while now. Perhaps it’s just observational cluelessness on my part, but while it seems obvious to me, hardly anyone writes as if they’ve thought it through, to my eye.
I was reminded by reading the following recently in Joseph Epstein’s essay, “Quotatious”:
“Although there is very little of Geoffrey Madan in Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, which is chiefly composed of things he had read or heard other people say, when you have read through this slender volume you feel rather as if you have come to know Madan — and in a way that you may not feel you know the author of a book twice the length, every word of which was written by the author. Merely by knowing what he finds amusing, and what profound, one feels one comes to know the man himself. W.H. Auden, who was nervous about being the subject of a biography, felt that he had tipped his mitt quite as much as he cared to when he published A Certain World, his commonplace book, a compilation that he called “a sort of autobiography.” In a brief foreword to the volume, he noted: “Here, then, is a map of my planet.” I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said that “you are what you eat,” but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.”
I agree with Epstein completely. In fact, I’d extend the idea: The internet, as a medium, is good for only two things — reading text, and writing text. When you write text in the format some call a blog (and others a journal or diary), you are writing a narrative. You are inviting others to know what you find amusing, and what profound. You are selecting some actions of your life to highlight, while discarding others.
In short, you are writing a character.
Whether that character accurately reflects you, or is wholly fictional; an idealized version of yourself, or even a deliberately villainous portrait… That is up to you as a writer.
Make no mistake, though. Your readers will find you sympathetic or antagonistic wholly on the basis of what you choose to tell them, and how. Just like a character in a work of fiction.
I know a blogger who has a large reputation. Part of that reputation is how they get into scuffles with their readers or with other big name bloggers every now and then. What’s interesting, in this context, is how they’ll then write, “This blog is not the totality of who I am. You may think you know me, but you don’t. I have other qualities, both good and bad, that you know nothing about, and to judge me solely on what you see here is to work on very limited information.”
I’ve told them an early version of this piece. “If so, whose fault is that? Who chose to omit those qualities from what the world sees? Do you think your readers are somehow clairvoyant, or telepathic, and can see something you’ve never told them in the first place?”
Ezra Pound once said, “The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.” While that can be used to justify writing a sequence of “A… C” and having faith the smarter reader will infer the elided B (or even, if one is lucky, “A… D“), it does not justify “L… U”.
So, some modest pieces of advice:
* When writing a blog post, consider how you would react if you read it as a character’s statement in a novel. Is it interesting? Is it consistent with what has come before? If it isn’t consistent, does it illuminate the character in useful ways?
* Does the post show you in the light you want to be seen? If you’re showing a part of yourself you don’t like, can you withstand the criticism that may come, or, even better, will you be willing to use the criticism to become more like who you’d really like to be?
My hope is this thought can be useful to fiction writers as well:
* If I were to read this narrative from my character in a blog, what would I think of them? Would I find them interesting enough to read the next day?
UPDATED TO ADD: I was talking this over with Ulrika over dinner, and she replied with Mamet’s Question: “What’s my action?”
For those who don’t know, there’s a book called, A Practical Handbook for the Actor, based on workshops the authors attended with David Mamet. “What’s my action?” is Mamet’s analogue to the Method Question, “What’s my motivation?” Mamet’s point is that motivation doesn’t matter if the audience cannot see an action you, as an actor, are showing them. All the internal despair in the world means nothing if the audience can’t see it through your actions.
Same thing here. Without the action of communicating to the reader through writing it down on the screen, you don’t get your character across — no matter how well you might know the character, because they’re “you.”