On Exposure
Honesty and intention in writing 01 June 2021 — Reflections
Be a writer. Go ahead! Put yourself out there!
Good encouragement, I suppose. We’re all slightly mad to keep this up, to keep up either a blog of some sort or publishing fiction and poetry. Not necessarily because we ever run out of things to say (experience will continue your entire life), nor even because we must make things up/create, something that wasn’t there in the first instance, but because that expression, “put yourself out there” quite literally means exposing yourself.
Not that we’re talking about the summary conviction, here. Not so much, but nevertheless, what we reveal in our writing tends to be intensely personal…
but our readers can’t fucking stand it when we lie.
But that is asking a lot. We’ve all got corners of memory, existence, experience we’d rather everyone not know. Some of us are more secretive, untrusting, suspicious than others. I’ve mentioned honesty and its connection to quality writing before, a la Stephen King. After all, isn’t that what it means to “put yourself out there”?
Part of the reason, aside from the age old model of truth (aletheia: the revealed), is that honesty is reflected in two sites of your writing: a) the subject of your writing, and b) in the way you occupy the space you’ve decided to share.
What your subject is, whatever you’ve chosen to focus on (i.e., emotion, experience, an event…), this is something that is going to be directly exposed. This is the part of the text that isn’t necessarily up for interpretation (uh, if it is, you weren’t clear from the outset as to what your intentions were); the subtext, where mountains, oceans, and huge graveyards of association lie, this is the area where interpretation becomes critical; but it’s a slower exposure, something that actually only reveals itself as what the reader themselves are dealing with/taking out of the piece. However, you must care about this superficial subject; if you’re not interested, feeling lackadaisical, then the reader feels the same. You’re reaching for connection. If you’re not honest, it won’t latch.
