Diamonds, droplets and shades of transparency
How writing about myself makes me feel both invisible and exposed
As a child, I hid the stories I wrote from my parents, or anyone, to read. They were my secret garden, the wild orchard where I could allow everything that lived inside me come out. I felt that if people read those stories, I would be naked in front of them, or worse — utterly unprotected.
When I began to write in earnest —with the ambition of becoming a published author — I more or less did the same: I invented stories and characters that would allow me to voice what was living inside me, without having to step forward and be truly seen for who I was. Or perhaps I was hoping my true self would be discerned as a distant shade, faintly glimmering, throught the veils of the characters I had put up for the story’s convenience.
I didn’t do this consciously, but that’s definitely how it worked for me. Only it didn’t work. In the sense that I was always far too interwoven with my books to actually see them as seperate from myself, and that when I had to talk about them, I inevitably had to talk about how I came to invent them, and why.
There is no way you can talk about your work without being blatantly honest about yourself, unless you are very good at spinning masks or disappearing behind smoke screens, and you are willing to keep that up for a lifetime.
I am not. So I was confronted with this issue head-on from the very first adolescent novel I managed to get published thirteen years ago. That particular story was about two musicians with telepathic skills who forged a deep bond beyond anything rational or logical, simply because they were somehow connected and were able to read each other’s fear and darkness for what it was.
(Does this ring a bell, as far as themes go? I admit I find it slightly comical, looking back from where I am now.)
‘What about you, can you read minds?’ a clever editor once asked me to my face, as we sat discussing my book, lying on the table between us.
‘No she can’t,’ cut in the elderly newspaper critic sitting with us, before I had as much as formulated an answer in my head that wouldn’t make me look like a complete fool. ‘Or she would have slapped me by now.’
A true story, that.
I forgave him, because he invariably gave my work good reviews — and they were genuine, I knew that, he was perfectly capable of killing you with words — and he also turned out to be the editor for another publishing house that took on my work a few years later. At that occasion, I spent a whole day with him at his home, going through my manuscript, line by line, to hone it to perfection. ‘This is a rough diamond’, he said. ‘We are going to polish it.’
I looked at the annotations he had made in my text, wondering where, under all of those chippings, words and phrases marked in red, sometimes entire paragraphs discarded with one stroke of his ball-point pen (ever the school master, he couldn’t help it), he still discerned something worth of being called a diamond.
But his was a master class and no mistake. There was only the text and his uncompromising analysis, questioning every turn of phrase or plot. He was right about almost everything. He helped me to look at my text, not as some deep evocation of who I was, but as an object I had lovingly crafted, and as an object, I learned, it could be improved. To this day, I remember that session with gratitue and respect, because that was the day he helped me turn from an apprentice into a writer.
And one thing I have come to know is that for me, as a writer and a human being, there is no hiding.
I used to think that you can either write about something that doesn’t affect you but holds an intellectual challenge, a topic you wish to explore professionaly, and come at it with all the skill and mastery you’ve got, or you can write about something that pulls your entrails apart and leaves you bleeding even as you are putting down the words. And okay, granted, there might be a zone in between as well, a blending of skills and personal interests.
But it turns out that there is a third approach to this, for me, which both delights and surprises me.
To serve as a door for the wind to pass through, I wrote earlier this year. To let go of any personal agenda and be a vessel for what Spirit wants to manifest.
The contradiction here, of course, is that my principal way of allowing the wind of soul to move into the world, is by wrapping it in my story as it passes through me. Or at least, by allowing it to make use of my personal story, my interest, my worries and my evolution, as a means of transport for its own message.
Even if the majority of my blogposts (and even some Saplings, up to a point) are very, very personal, I honestly feel that a lot of what I have been writing this last year is less about me than any of my earlier fiction writing used to be. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say: I am exposing myself more, but not in order to be more visible. That I actually get to be more visible is a side-effect, but one I no longer crave and fear in equal measure.
I am sure I will write more fiction in years to come. But I no longer need characters in a story to express what lives inside me. Instead, I have come to accept — and to enjoy, although never without a frisson of fear — that to become more transparent is to let more light pass though.
