What Happens When You’re no Longer Invisible?

Writers, despite appearances, hate the limelight. We usually have our ideas alone, at moments we least expect them. And we write alone. And struggle with whatever inner demons stop the purity of our thoughts from making it to the page. And then, when we’re done. When we have fought the good fight and convinced our agents and publishers and editors and the book’s all done. The last thing we really want is to step onto a public stage and shout out about it.

It’s kinda ironic given than fact that I am writing this on a very public platform with the expectation of achieving the exact opposite of invisibility. I shall get to the why, in a minute. But first the how. Because we, as writers, always write from conviction, the outcome, whether it’s a book of fiction or non-fiction, always contains large chunks of us in it. Writing is the one area where we cannot hide.

Writing is also the one profession where distancing yourself from the outcome of your labours, though desirable, is practically impossible. Everything a writer writes is personal. From the phraseology to the syntax, from the grand ideas to the little asides. As a result, when the book we worked on finally comes out we want to have nothing to do with it. We consider that, as writers, we’re done. The work really needs to speak for itself.

If it’s great, it’s a job well done. We don’t want to know beyond the sales and the reviews readers post. Constantly receiving praise makes us feel awkward (though it is always appreciated). The tiniest form of criticism devastates us (we take it way too personally). If it’s not well received we really want to curl up and die somewhere. Preferably deep underground.

None of these feelings change. But the world has. We’re now more connected, more transparent and more visible than ever before. Even if we do not blog readers can reach us through email, they can follow us on Twitter, stalk us on Facebook and connect with us directly on G+. As writers, ideally, we still want the world to go away and leave us alone (oh yes, and read our books too). Transparency and connectivity however now demand a presence.

Traditionally a writer has been an unknown quantity. If he was uber-popular there was a sense that at least he was writing something decent (never a total guarantee). If he wasn’t, the odds of knowing what he was about were small. Either way a reader took a chance buying a book. The fact that so many readers were willing to take that small leap of faith is more indicative of our lack of choices when buying a book than anything else.

In the new world that’s rising writers are way more visible (or they ought to be). If we really want our voice to be read then we have to make sure that it can also be heard and social media provides an incredible platform to do just that. It also begs the question of what happens when we’re no longer invisible as a writer? When readers ask our opinion, lavish praise upon us, want to know when our next book is coming out and recommend us to their friends we find ourselves on a platform where we have to work out entirely new ways to behave.

Writers act as either filters or guides (and frequently there is an overlap here). We either act as a kind of collective subconscious, filtering reality in a way that most people think it should be (or wish it should be) or we take readers forth into brave new worlds, showing the way things will work and how they shall function, helping them synthesize new ways of behaving.

The argument has been that this process is done best when the writer is left alone, fighting whatever inner struggle is necessary to get the job done. The idea behind this inaccessibility was that the moment a writer is visible he also becomes self-conscious and the potential of attention to destroy his ability to write (which has given rise to the myth of writer’s block) rises.

Well, there is an old-fashioned British expression that I think beautifully sums up my ideas on that argument: “poppycock” (and you’ll have to Google the etymology on that one). Certainly working in plain sight is challenging. Responding to praise or criticism is a skill in itself. Becoming accountable for the efficacy of your art is damn hard. At the same time the labour of writing, shared with your readers, becomes way less burdensome, the struggle with inner demons lessens and a writer and his audience become, to some extent, co-creationists, informing each other’s worldviews and opinions.

Writers get to know first-hand who their readers are. Readers experience a writer’s sense of values, drive and personality. Visibility, as it happens then, increases a writer’s ability to act as a filter or a guide, rather than just the opposite. It makes the part of being a writer a little harder but by banishing isolation it turns the writer from the solitary creature of the industrial age to the troubadour of the community that he’d always been in the past. That is a win for everybody in my book (pun intended).

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