Being Brave and Speaking True

I’ve been surprised recently at how many people compliment me when I talk about my personal experiences that led me to write The Bishop’s Wife. I feel sometimes like all I have to do is slice open a vein and bleed on stage for people and they’re happy. (I know it’s more complicated than that, but . . .) I think part of this reaction is that honesty is so rare. That is precisely why it is so valuable.

Why is being honest so rare?

Well, despite the fact that we throw around the idea that we should be honest with everyone, that “honesty is the best policy,” yada yada, it isn’t true. Trivial honesty, the kind of honesty that goes along with reciting facts in order, or being able to do simple math, is lauded, I suppose, but it doesn’t cost much. Parents are always telling children to tell the truth and punish them for lying. But my experience as a parent leads me to believe that children who lie well are the ones who are best off socially. We expect people to tell lies in social situations all the time. Specifically, we expect them to be adroit in learning when people want to hear which parts of which truth. As someone who has multiple autistic family members, I see this more clearly perhaps than most people do.

Lying well is important in business and in politics. That honesty is valued in art is something that is very difficult to believe and even harder to actually produce. It’s why there are actually not very many true artists around, relative to the size of the population. Art is not the same as entertainment, though it can make you laugh at the unexpected revelation. Art means learning a different set of values, ones that don’t get you very far in the business world. It’s one of the reasons that artists tend to be crap at managing their own money. These skills do not go together often. Learning to be honest often leads to disastrous business consequences.

One of the things that artists do is to expose uncomfortable truths. If as an artist, all you do is tell uncomfortable truths about other people, well, I can’t say I admire that terrifically. I’d call that satire mostly. It means holding other people at a bit of a distance and enjoying their foibles, but not revealing yourself. The best artists are the ones who are willing to be truthful about themselves. That means being the opposite of a politician, who spends a lifetime massaging the facts about the past so that they appear in the best possible light in every circumstance. A politician works on making sure that no one is offended, while an artist works on making sure everyone is offended—self included. A politician has a motto that everyone can agree with. An artist may say something simple, but it can be tricky to take any phrase out of context without stripping it of meaning.

I think the more I learn about really writing well, the more I realize it means exposing myself in the most fundamental way. It’s no wonder that I sometimes want to hide after an intense writing session. I can’t write in a room with other people for fear that they may read what I have put down before I am ready for it. I revise and revise in part because I want to make it better, but also because I am trying to get ready for the big moment when I stand naked before the world, and fiddling with words is my way of doing that.

As a writer, I’m not trying to get people to vote for me. For all writers sometimes talk about “sympathetic characters,” a writer isn’t trying to get readers to fall in love with characters, either. Not really. That’s a distraction, a side show from the real one. A writer wants readers to fall in love with a voice, to be unable to look away from the truth, to feel as if this has happened to them because they read about it. That’s why there’s nothing safe about writing. It is always about you, no matter how you cloak it, in fantasy, or in history. It’s all about now. If that sounds narcissistic, maybe it is.

You see how I accepted that? As a writer, you have to deal with criticism without rejecting it immediately. You have to accept it all as a true reaction. I know some people say that it’s not personal, but it IS personal. As a writer, that is part of the job. Everything is personal. It makes you fragile and strong at the same time. It is about you. The more you try to escape from that, the saner you may be. But the more you embrace it, I think the better your art is.