Disconnect

I have a friend whose mom was utterly shocked when I told her that I have a great interest in writing romance stories. To her, this made absolutely no sense. In real life, I'm a guy who spends a large amount of time playing rpg/adventure video games, doing martial arts, backpacking, stuff like that. I have a dark sense of humor, and I'm generally not a nice person. The fact that I wrote romance stories, or at least stories with a heavy romance overtone, was simply unbelievable. It didn't fit my person at all.

I think most people can agree that there is a kind of disconnect between the person they are in public, and the person they are in private. Even with close friends, the person you are when you're alone doesn't always fully come out. Best friends and significant others probably know about that person, just because they spend so much time around you, but very few others do.

For writers, it can be hard to remove that private person from your writing. After all, it's not very often that writing is public event. The end product may be shared publicly, but the process is so incredibly personal because it comes from deep within you. So putting a story out there is effectively the same as putting your private person out there. People may not realize that when they're reading it, but the author is often acutely aware of this fact, and that's part of the reason so many people are afraid to make their writing public. They don't want to be judged for the person they are when they're alone. There's a reason they have a public persona, after all.

This isn't to say, of course, that what a writer writes and who they actually are can't be disconnected. I've talked before about how we shouldn't judge a person too heavily on what it is they write, because they may be pulling from other inspirations, like friends, family, or other characters they have seen. But it is certainly difficult to fully remove one's self from a story. In some way, in everything you write, you are putting a piece of yourself down in ink.

That kind of thinking can be scary. To think that you are putting yourself on the line. That someone might read what you write and make a decision about what kind of person you are because of it. We've all seen that happen to our idols. Fans think they're something they're not because of what they have or haven't done. Whether we want to admit it or not, we've probably done it ourselves. I certainly know I have.

But at the same time, we have a potential in our work. That piece of ourselves that we put down can do so many things. It can reach out and touch a person. Make them see, or feel, or remember. Whatever you do, in whatever field, you have that ability. To affect a person. And maybe, just maybe, you'll affect two. Or three. Or a hundred. Or a thousand. Maybe you will touch the entire world.

So it can be tempting to disconnect yourself from what you do. Say, "it was just a spur of the moment" or "I don't know where that came from." But you know it's not true. Deep down, you know it came from you, that it is you, in some small way, and that it can never not be you. And while it is scary, you shouldn't be afraid of it. Because it has a power within it, that exists because you put it there.

One day, the things you create may light up a person's world.

And do you really want to disconnect yourself from that light?