Somewhere around chapter four of a manuscript I read last month, I hit a personal story and slid right off it. I’m telling you, it was pure Teflon!
Nothing was wrong with the story, per se. The sentences were clean, grammatically correct, which, trust me, is a plus. The story was, on paper, potentially enormous — the kind of thing that reorganizes a person from the inside. The author had gone through something hard. He’d come out the other side different. I knew this because he’d told me this was so, right there in black and white.
That’s the part I want you to catch. He told me so.
I read the story a second time, searching for something to sink my teeth into, and confirmed I was biting into a glass of water. I knew what had happened to him the way you know what happened to somebody at Sunday brunch, when you’re both holding bagels and the guy across the table says, “Yeah, that was a rough couple of years,” and you say, “Oh man,” and then you both reach for the cream cheese and the conversation moves on to parking. How crazy drivers are now adays.
That’s not a story. That’s a summary of a story, delivered at a distance calibrated to keep everybody comfortable. Focused on their condiments.
ZZZZZZZZZ.
I had zero sense of who this guy was. Couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup.
Here’s the part that took me years to understand: this is almost never a writing problem.
Just so we’re clear. This writer knew how to write. He’d proven it for twenty thousand words. He could build an argument, land a joke, explain a concept three different ways from bagel Sunday. Then he arrived at himself and the prose went all soft-focus. You know, hazy AF. Suddenly it’s “a difficult period.” It’s “some things I’m not proud of.” It’s “I had to do a lot of work on myself.”
Cool. Which things? What work? Who else was in the room?
When I’m evaluating or doctoring a manuscript, I’ll sit with the author and dig, because digging is the part of this job I most enjoy. This is my chance to really see someone in their full humanity. There’s beauty in there and some seriously interesting stuff. Valuable stuff. And what happens, reliably, is that the author gets more protective at exactly the moment I get more curious. He’ll tell me the roundabout of the thing but not give up any details. He’ll give me the timeframe but not the afternoon, the one when life changed in an ordinary instant. (Look at me quoting Joan Didion.) At some point I just have to ask, “This way you’re protecting yourself on the page… is that the same way you protect yourself in your life?
But this story isn’t about this particular writer. Or my penchant for asking personal questions. This story is about you. And me.
That protection — which is doing an excellent job of keeping you safe — is also what makes you inaccessible. On the page and off it. Your reader picked up your book because they wanted to be understood by somebody who’s been where they are. Instead, they get a competent stranger describing weather from a great height.
Now. Before you go the other direction on me.
I’ve written before about the fourth pillar, the one nobody talks about — respect — and how fast you can torch it by dumping your bankruptcy and your third divorce into a book that has nothing to do with either. I stand by every word. This is not me telling you to bleed on the page and call it authenticity. Because that’s sorta gross.
(BTW, know, like, and trust are the first three pillars of connection and authority.)
Vagueness and discretion are not the same thing. Discretion is choosing what to leave out. Vagueness is including something and hollowing it out on the way in, so it takes up space without doing any work.
You can decline to tell a story. That’s allowed. That’s often correct. What you can’t do is tell it in a way so blurred that the reader gets nothing and you get credit for having been vulnerable.
The detail that fixes it is usually smaller than you think. It’s not the confession. It’s the specificity.
It’s not “my marriage was falling apart.” It’s the fact that you’d started taking the long way home after work, despite the bumper-to-bumper traffic and the blinding migraines. It’s not “I hit rock bottom.” It’s that you were sitting in the parking lot of a Dunkin’—nursing a Contigo full of gin— at 5:40 in the morning because it was the only place open and you didn’t want to be in your house. It’s not “I was terrified.” It’s what you were thinking, word for word, while you nodded and said you were fine. (Better yet, what would have happened if you’d said what was truly on your mind? That’s the shit I want to know.)
None of those require you to hand over your worst secret. Every one of them lets me get a bead on you. That’s the whole trade — you don’t owe your reader everything, you owe them something they could not have guessed.
So here’s the test. Go find the most personal passage in your draft. Strip your name off it. Now ask whether four hundred other people in your field could have written that exact paragraph about their own lives.
If the answer is yes, you haven’t told us anything. You’ve handed us a bagel.
