Becoming Invisible

[Paul Whybrow]

I came across this quote from Philip Pullman, taken from his book of essays on storytelling Daemon Voices:

We who tell stories should be modest about the job, and not assume that just because the reader is interested in the story, they're interested in who's telling it. A storyteller should be invisible as far as I am concerned.

It appeared in an illustrated article on what Pullman considers the four key responsibilities of writers:

4 Key Responsibilities of Writers According to Philip Pullman

It reminded me a bit of Margaret Atwood's admission, as found in her book on writing Negotiating With The Dead:

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté."

I previously posted on the notion of authors appearing as a character in their own books. Even if we don't put in a cameo appearance, I guess it's inevitable that some of our personal views will permeate the text.

Some authors of fiction deliberately take a stance that reflects their attitude, be it political, feminist, about gender fluidity or man's desecration of the planet. Consider Charles Dickens' writing, which contained important messages about poverty, inequality and social deprivation, as based on personal experience.

The problem with remaining invisible is that in these days of self-promotion, selfies and blogging, we're expected to share our feelings about what we wrote. Even if we're only in the spotlight for a moment, that interview or videoed appearance remains on the internet forever...we wind up haunting ourselves!

It's often stressed that we need to develop our 'voice'—our own distinctive style of writing—but how to do that and remain invisible too feels like a conundrum.

I typed The End of my fifth novel last night, which produced the usual happy-sad reaction, and I'll be embarking on a couple of weeks of editing—which shouldn't be too arduous a task, as I've edited as I've gone along. However, after reading Philip Pullman's advice, I'll be on the lookout for places where I intrude as an author. Certainly, I share some traits and attitudes with my protagonist detective, but I don't want it to read like I'm being preachy, using him as a mouthpiece.

Writing in the first person inevitably makes your story sound up close and personal, but it's quite possible to do the same thing in, say, third-person omniscient if you mistakenly have your character reveal information that they couldn't possibly know.

How do you handle the problem of straying into your own writing?

 

[Katie-Ellen]

The voice of some is shaped by the need to express a response to a problem for which there is probably no remedy as such. I will read that writer. The voice of others is shaped by the need to share opinion and the need to be right. I will switch off from that writer.

1984 was a response to the threat of Stalinism (Stalin-Tito crisis 1948) but it manages not to become a polemic.

 

[Amber]

How do you handle the problem of straying into your own writing?

I have to edit myself out.

 

[Amber]

The voice of some is shaped by the need to express a response to a problem for which there is probably no remedy as such. I will read that writer. The voice of others is shaped by the need to share opinion and the need to be right. I will switch off from that writer.

1984 was a response to the threat of Stalinism (Stalin-Tito crisis 1948) but it manages not to become a polemic.

po·lem·ic
pəˈlemik/
noun

1. 1.
   a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something.
   "his polemic against the cultural relativism of the sixties"
   synonyms:diatribe, invective, rant, tirade, broadside, attack, harangue, condemnation, criticism, stricture, admonition, rebuke; More
   
   
   
   • 
     
     I had to look it up.
     

 

[Amber]

I love being invisible and the only protection from being visible in the childish make-believe that I write is the fact that in what I write, I am rarely the same person that I was yesterday - but if I say that my identity is so fluid, then everyone will think that I have a personality disorder and I certainly hope that isn't the case. I once read through the personality disorder diagnostic manual and concluded that I have all of the disorders and that must mean that they all cancel out in a perfect storm. Maybe they should add that disorder to the manual: this person thinks she has every single personality disorder known to man!

You mean an unstable sense of self? This is a characteristic of personality disorders.

Coincidentally, or not, I was watching videos on sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists and then my YouTube stream rolled into personality disorders. Which, I am a tad familiar with already. But still, there's always a new way to look at information.

An unstable sense of self comes from being told what you see, what you feel, what you have experienced is not what you've seen, felt, or experienced. It comes from not having a healthy relationship with reality. You might want to say, "Yeah. Duh." (I know I do... a little) BUT .. the interesting part is that it comes from gaslighting. Which, is the epiphany I had last week. Victims of trauma are often gaslighted and they're usually gaslighted by the very same people who traumatized them because ... the original trauma just wasn't enough.

Also, their trauma is often the result of a relationship with family members who have an interest in keeping them unsure about what happened. The individual who was traumatized has an interest in repairing, maintaining, and keeping the relationship. The younger they are, the stronger the impulse to become complicit in their own gaslighting by considering the possibility that they were wrong, they were mistaken, that they overreacted. Not too surprisingly, after being trained to constantly question their reality, trauma victims often don't know what reality is. They are constantly asking, "Did this happen, or did I imagine it?" Also, "This happened, it made me feel this way, does what happen warrant this amount of feeling? Does it warrant this reaction?"

I don't think the DSM (whatever number they're on now) explains things very well. There's a difference between someone not knowing who they are, which in general means they need to find out what they like, what they believe etc. and an unstable sense of self. The two are often used interchangeably when they are not the same at all. Sometimes they intersect but a 15 year old not being sure who they are and what they want to do in life is not the same as someone with a personality disorder who isn't sure about objective reality and whether their responses to that reality are appropriate.

 

[Amber]

Nah, I was joking about the perfect storm of personality disorders canceling each other out. I thought it was funny since everything in psychology is described as being on a spectrum and I wondered if one end of the spectrum would cancel out the other.
I did know a guy who had an identity crisis after he was put on antidepressants, though. He had been an asocial person and the meds had turned him into a gossip. His psychiatrist told him to put a photo of himself as a child on his bedside table to remind himself of his core beliefs about himself. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he was being gaslighted. He was married to a master manipulator who loved to tell everyone who they were. His mother was quite a character, too.
Writing is good for exploring issues of identity and objective reality. It is fun to try on different perspectives. This evening, I want to write from the perspective of a person named Dimbo Kugel. How did he get such an awful name is the first question that I need to answer.

Oh. Yeah. I studied psychology but I'm convinced now more than ever that there's only a very small amount of science in psychology. They are well meaning clergypeople who claim not to have a denomination. Which doesn't mean they aren't worth anything. But that's a different topic.

Your character names are often funny.