The Writer As Social Butterfly

[Dave Monroe]

The Writer As Social Butterfly
By Andrew Boryga on Friday, January 15, 2010


I realized I wanted to be a writer sophomore year of high school, when
I learned that engineering–my former ambition–required practicing
actual math and science. Not for me.

Impressionable as any 16-year-old, the “writer lifestyle” became all
too important to me. I turned to what I thought was the writer look:
black-rimmed glasses, messy hair (the natural way), and wrinkled
button-ups rolled to my elbows. I adopted the apparent “writer
mindset.” My opinions became gold, fart jokes became immature, and as
far as I was concerned, no one was capable of understanding the
“depth” of my writing.

I lost quite a few friends that year.

Writing itself is a solitary act, a lonely act. However, I’ve
learned­­––the hard way––that the solitude of writing doesn’t and
shouldn’t have to affect writers’ social lives.

It should be obvious that writers, writing about society, would make
it a point to immerse themselves in that society. But writers are
artists, and like most artists we tend to think of ourselves as
outcasts. The label is twofold; our creativity and panjandrum is
admired, and our variance from normal nine-to-fives is frowned upon.
But the mistake is buying into the outcast label, even cherishing it.
Doing so separates us from our audience, making us bitter, and even
worse, possibly leading to an aloof, chastising tone few enjoy
reading.

Interacting with others, even with those who could care less for
writing, is crucial to a developing writer. When first meeting
someone, we break him or her down in our minds. We analyze their
mannerisms, values, habits and speech. If anything is unusual or
interesting enough we remember it. For a fiction writer, this process
results over time in a well of characteristics to choose from when
constructing a character.

If you need a more convincing reason to be a social writer, just look
at On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece: it was entirely based on
real-life characters Kerouac encountered throughout his life, such as
Neal Cassady­­, the basis for Dean Moriarty. It is a captivating book
because it’s relevant, and more importantly, it’s relatable, and that
is what good writing is all about.

Contrast this with, say, Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon,
one of the most secluded authors in history, has not been photographed
in years and rumors about his identity and location have been swirling
since the ’60s.

Gravity’s Rainbow—Pynchon’s magnum opus­­­­­ and National Book Award
winner in 1974—drew acclaim for its transgressive nature. However, it
was also criticized for its obscurity and deemed “unreadable, turgid,
overwritten and obscene”. Pynchon himself admitted to his obscurity in
a rare interview, saying, “I was so fucked up while I was writing
it…that now I go back over some of those sequences and I can’t figure
out what I could have meant.”

I’m not going to bash a classic like Gravity’s Rainbow, but maybe if
Pynchon got out a little more often and tried to better connect with
other people, his characters and themes wouldn’t be so unnecessarily
complex.

And that’s not such a terrible notion to follow personally. After
sophomore year I realized two important things. One, my writing was
self-centered and uninteresting, and two, I was becoming someone I
wasn’t. The next year I dropped the faux writer persona, started
laughing at my friends’ stupid jokes again, and grew as an honest
writer and person in the process.

http://www.litdrift.com/2010/01/15/writer-as-social-butterfly/