I’ve been thinking about actors of late, since my partner recently acted in August: Osage County (the terrific play by Tracy Letts). I have often felt relieved that I am a writer and not an actor. Actors must expose themselves so ruthlessly, it seems to me, using their bodies as their means of expression, their own experiences as a conduit to discovering their characters’ emotions. We can see so clearly how having a particular physique can limit an actor’s range. An actress might feel like a leading lady, but if her body doesn’t convey leading lady, it’s unlikely she’ll be cast as a leading lady. To be a writer, I have often felt, is to be so much freer. Writers aren’t bound by the limits of selfhood. Are they?
What an illusion! Writers, when we are at our best, are always mining the deepest troughs of self, even when we are not writing autobiography. Our work is a lens onto the world, focused and colored by our backgrounds, our values, our attitudes and personalities. To separate those subjective and somewhat predetermined elements from our work would be to negate our individual voices and render our work uninteresting.
We read not for some objectified neutral story (computers are already generating such stories), but for the stories that come from particular minds, from individuals who write with the full force of the subjective self.
In my own work there is not a lot of overt autobiography, but my mental landscape—my preoccupations and obsessions and fears and hopes—are all over the pages. Shockingly so! Sometimes embarrassingly so!
The same is true of all writers, I believe. It isn’t difficult to extrapolate from the work the person who inhabits the mind behind that work. The mind of Alice McDermott could not be more different from, say, Chuck Palahniuk. Or how about Lidia Yuknavitch and Donna Tartt? Or Brett Easton Ellis and William Faulkner? Simply mentioning these names often brings an entire universe view to mind.
So, it should not be surprising that some of us writers are a bit cautious about revealing more of ourselves in the way we are encouraged to do these days. Is it necessary to know details of our work habits, our romantic lives, our political affiliations, our food preferences? We’re already naked on the page. Read the work, it’s all you need to know.
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I find true honest writing to be one of the most scariest things to do. Facing yourself without preconceptions but simply viewing "you" through your own lens.
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