how do we write about things that make us seem like worse people?
challenging the tendency to write and edit ourselves as sympathetic characters
I have this friend who’s trying to be a writer. Her name’s Janet. She asked me what to not write about, and I didn’t have an answer for her, so I figured I’d pose the question on her behalf.
“How do we write about things that make us seem like worse people?”
She’s heard the adages about writing to excavate her darkness and vulnerabilities. She’s tried that. It’s always been scary at the time. Hitting publish feels like giving too much away, she’s gone too far. People shouldn’t know these things about her.
She’s found that using a pen name distances herself from the page — it helps to pretend those aren’t really her guts spilling out. She shares about her politics, personal struggles, anxieties. She wants her writing to connect to people, to make them realize they aren’t alone if they don’t like their body or have scary dreams about not mattering.
But for all the openness those pieces took, they still serve to make Janet seem good. In general, she comes across in her writing as endearing or sympathetic.
A person sharing their experiences of feeling not good enough doesn’t usually make us like them less. We all feel that sometimes, and it’s encouraging to recognize we aren’t struggling alone. We’re all equally entangled in the human condition.
But Janet finds herself avoiding some topics entirely — the ones where she might come across as bad. She actively evades writing about her worst thoughts of others, the ones that “would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish”, as her writing fairy-godmother Anne Lamott said.
Janet says it’s less complicated to write about when she’s sad, versus the times she’s needlessly lied to her friends. It’s simpler jotting down her fears around not being funny, instead of how she thinks she’s smarter than her brother. It’s easier to write about the worst thoughts she has of herself, and omit the worst thoughts she has about others.
Is it only a question of audience? Maybe some of her stories could help someone out there, but those tales will come at the expense of people she actually knows.
She told me about meeting up with a high school friend a few months ago. She was zoning out of their conversation because she couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d outgrown them. She thought their time was misspent on who they used to be, on things that seem so trivial to her now.
I don’t know what to tell her really. I’m don’t know if it’s a good idea to share things that will make her come across worse to people who know her. Maybe strangers on the internet can keep a distanced interest, but if she was writing like that about a friend— well, that might hurt.
I do know firsthand that she can be arrogant or selfish or disloyal. The same way we all have our negative traits. But I’m not sure if she writes about that stuff if people could think as well of her.
Should we just not write about our worst parts? I mean the really incriminating stuff. The stuff that keeps us turning at night, wishing we could go back, so sure we can be better.
Writers all aspire to be more intentional. Writing is a tool for discovering ourselves, and it also gives us space to model a new image.
We write into existence versions of ourselves that we wish to become, that we hope others see. It seems dangerous to codify our pride and superiority and self-righteousness into this ongoing recording of ourselves.
Is it just a condition of writing, and editing? In a conversation, we slip up and say the wrong thing so easily. We can be cruel, thoughtless. But when we read what we’ve written days later, it gives space to step back and edit out the pieces of ourselves we prefer to keep at arms length.
I don’t have a solution for her. Maybe she could test out writing fiction or poetry. That way, Janet could make up a character to explore a problem she’s having — craft a proxy to implore other writers for tips on her behalf.
Let me know if you’ve come across potential answers. I’ll be sure to pass along any advice you might have.
— Modestly, a janet surrogate
