Writing by personality vs writing as interaction

Presumably this will be the last post on writing for a while. And not so much to sum it up as to go back to my first impression on the topic, I just find it much easier to accept an idea that has haunted me and given me some mental distress for a long time. The idea is that, your writing is not, should not, and need not be about you. 

To start with the Ortega formula: Yo soy yo y mis circumstancias. I am me AND my circumstances. Over the years my emphasis went from "me" to "circumstances" to finally "AND." The conjunction is the keyword here. To write about oneself, which according to Thomas Wolfe, is inevitable for everyone, because every writing is, in a sense, autobiographic. But how can anyone justify the fact that writing has never been seen as a tool for personal remembering until recently, and how can any meaningful writing come about if the personality lacks meaning in the first place? The only escape from this, which is very sad to think of, is the magic word "imagination." The story you've been told a million times that J. K. Rowling created her Harry Porter universe by simply "imagining." And so they say, if you don't write well, it's because you lack the imagination. Sad but true, thought most wannabe writers.

It is as if some of us have this miraculous "imagination" in them while the others just don't. But where do these imaginations come from, if not from our mundane, unextraordinary, common lives? Have not all the imaginary characters their real life counterparts? This is the Wolfean truth, and it applies to everyone. So the lack of imagination is, in a sense, the lack of truthfulness to oneself, which can be misleading because it still has much to do with the personality, not the practice. I've come to realize that being truthful to myself is actually a skill, not a habit, or at least a very advanced mental habit that very few people can acquire through their lives. Nevertheless, the lack of imagnation is the symptom, the lack of truthfulness is the disease. 

Yet in order to be truthful, according to the late philosopher Bernard Williams, there are two merits that are essential: accuracy and sincerity. To be accurate about things and feelings requires much mental training. To be sincere about it requires much will to truth. Most people write about themselves only they don't write ALL about themselves because they thought people might laugh at some of the contents. That is neither lack of confidence nor lack of courage. That is lack of truthfulness. For one, people simply cannot recall all the details of past events as good as those professional writers do. These are the notes they take whenever they observed some human traits interesting enough to go into the notebook, but the notebook is never seen, never published, not mainly because the writer wants to keep it secret, but because the material is not readable. It's too raw to be digested. But aren't your blog too raw to be read? Do bloggers consider the readability of their blogs? And why is that omitted by most?

The simple answer: a perverted notion regarding writing. People see themselves as consumers instead of producers when writing. The consumerism of our age is accompanied by a notion called "everything is labor," and so a laborious thing such as writing is strangely seen as a consumption, all the same when activities like going on a tour becomes a chore that combines rigid planing, reaching certain goals, photo taking, posting on Instagram, making up little stories to go by, updating your social network status, and so on. Activities which were supposed to be relaxing and fun are now burdensome, routine, and compulsory (pressured by the society). You kind of stuck in between. You know it's supposed to be a relaxation, yet cannot help but worry about all those social norms and feel a bit responsible to fulfill at least some of them, and so you waver between leisure and labor. Such wavering is, in my opinion, what truly kills the writing spirit.

Writing is never relaxing, just as thinking never is. Writing can be easy, but just as the great teachers of all skills tend to do, lowering the difficulty is only for the student to get used to it, to develop certain neural links that automate some parts of the process, so that the student can learn more and become more skilled. This is called preparation phase. To take it as a relaxation is as absurd as to do an elementary school homework to relax oneself. No. It's just boring and meaningless, even for entertainment's sake. You should probably do the things you already know how to enjoy, or things that are designed to be easily learned to enjoy, like video games.

One should think of one's life in terms of leisure and labor, and the relationship inbetween, before one can make reasonable arrangements for one's life. And when one does, the immediate and also fundamental reality that opens before his/her mind's eye is neither the self nor the personality, but the others in his/her life. To tackle with others is what life is about. This does not mean that one should base one's life around some other people, "to serve the people" as the communists love to say, rather, the core of the reality, as Ortega suggested it, is the interaction inbetween. It is the "and" between the "me" and the "circumstances." And so when one reorients one's writing accordingly, he/she writes not about himself/herself, neither about some outer reality that seems to have nothing to do with his/her person, (as many "advanced" writer tends to be "objective" while nothing in this world is objectvie by itself) but about how the outer reality affects oneself and how the reaction (or the plan of reaction) was (is). When such things happen, the focus is naturally there, because one does not react to each and every outer reality, but only those that touches the core of his/her life. The life has a certain structure like the geosphere. Those that affects you only superficially will gain your attention also superficially. Those that really get into you are the ones that require furthur handling. And while thinking belongs always to the latter situation, elaborate thinking, aka writing, is even more advanced than ordinary thinking, which is an advanced mental skill that needs yearly practice and deals with difficult problems, and so should always be restricted. 

Long answer short: people don't care about your WHOLE life, that is, your personality, but they do care about the common ground between their lives and your life, that is, the interaction inbetween. Focus on the common ground, the interaction.