The Social Writer

I was visiting with a group of old friends recently, people I’ve known since I was a teenager. They’re all great storytellers; it’s a large part of how we bonded. So, when we get together, we share a lot of tales. Some are very short; just anecdotes, really. Others are more involved, requiring the audience to settle in for a bit. Some are funny, some are surprising, some are informational, and some are all three. I learned, for instance, that one of my friends’ mother had carried her sister the length of the Korean Peninsula during the war. That was a good one.

Stories have been much on my mind recently as I’m writing a kind of memoir that’s a collection of them. At this three-day gathering, I told my share – over cocktails, at dinner tables, on walks through the city. I find that when I do so I like to consider my audience. Not everyone’s interested in football, music, or spirituality, after all. I’m also aware of the flow of the conversation, whether a story would add to what’s been said or send it somewhere completely different. It’s what we call socializing, something to which I, like a lot of writers I know, have a rather mixed relationship.

Because as I considered what I could add to a conversation, I became aware of the difference between a version of a story I would tell in that particular group, and the version I would tell if I were writing it. They were rarely the same. The one on the page would be shaped for the broadest audience possible, and would, I knew, be closer to what I was most interested in sharing. Meanwhile, I had trained myself to be polite and appropriate or to get a laugh with friends. Sometimes I wondered if I had ever let myself write a story without the limitations I had placed on myself in social settings. Those limitations could worm their way onto the page where they would do no good.

I’d brought a piece with me to work on. It was a tricky one, the original draft of which didn’t come together at all. I sat at my little table in my hotel room looking out at the street below me while I drank my coffee and waited. Writing is a kind of socializing too, though it begins in the privacy of the author and ends in the privacy of the reader. We all need that solitude sometimes, artist and audience alike. How else can you find what you care about now, not yesterday or forty years ago? That first draft had been like a story I’d told already, and when the new sentence came, and I realized that was it and I’d ended the thing without trying to, I was ready to put my shoes on and join my friends again.

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Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
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