The other day, Dave White blogged about writing and embarrassment:
Why are we embarrassed about our writing, creative or non-fiction?
I know that each of my stories have gone through some form of embarrassment for me. All the stories had something in them I did not want seen at some point, and there is always a moment of hesitation before I submit them. I find it's because there is always something personal in the stories, something about myself I'm not sure I'm willing to share.
I've said before that "Get Miles Away" is my favorite of my stories. It accomplished a lot of things in terms of writing and what I was hoping to do with my work. But it's also my most personal story. Beth was based on an amalgam of women I knew. The stalker felt things that I felt about these women (although pushed to a higher, more dramatic level--I had the feelings, not the knife or the homicidal thoughts, it is a mystery after all. I only knew the shock of being left without warning, and I asked what if someone unstable felt that....)... I was also Jackson Donne in the story as well. Just wanting to help. All of my stories have a part of me in [them].
In order for a story to be successful, you have to put a part of yourself into it. Some sort of emotion, something to make the story come to life. And that's hard. It's something inside of you, something you never let people see. When you write, [you] put that on the page for everyone to see.
Until the final, published copy, writing is constantly in development. As such, writers cannot know going in how much soul-searching they'll have to do.
I'm reminded of a workshop class I took at Hofstra with Phillip Lopate. My first piece was a P.I. story, which turned out to be the antithesis of what he wanted. I ended up writing a series of stories featuring a protag very much like me, with perhaps a bigger chip on his shoulder.
If anything, these stories were probably too specific to me and my hometown, not accessible by a wider audience--as I learned submitting stories for which I'd gotten A's in class. But the experience taught me to try over-the-top first and make adjustments later.
The class also showed me subtleties of fiction; the more grounded it is in reality, the more readily people will believe it. Conversely, authors who try too hard to protect themselves in fiction leave readers with a muddled picture; they may start wondering what secret is so precious to the author, but odds are they'll stop reading before they start wondering.
As personal as writing may seem, it is nonetheless a profession: the business of fiction writing is to create worlds that seem real and at the same time are not real. When Harrison Ford appeared on Inside the Actors' Studio, he offered the following advice:
"Live in front of people. Live in front of people. Let them see the good, the bad, the ugly, the weak, the strong, the conflicted, the terrible. One of the things about acting that gives me the greatest satisfaction is the opportunity for that emotional exercise. That investment to the point where it produces true emotion."
He went on to say he has no trouble reconciling what he does for an audience's benefit--serving whatever story he's trying to tell--with the privacy he likes himself.
I infer that, as part of his process, Ford creates the emotion he shows. As much as he gives his audience in performance, none of it reveals anything about him as a person.
Only the most superficial readers draw connections between an author's fiction and his real life:
"How could you write that? What does it say about you?"
"It says something about the character, not me. If I want to reveal something about myself, I'll write a memoir."
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