Coming Out of the Darkness - Matthew Greene

Sally Rooney has refused, in interviews, to talk about her private life. Author Debbie Urbanski recently wrote a piece for Literary Hub titled: If I tell you secrets about my personal life, will you look at my new book? The point Debbie made was, most of us are desperate for publicity, we need our books to sell, so we feel compelled to participate in the sharing of personal information. What are your thoughts on how much writers should share?

When I was younger, I wanted to be an actor. I lived for community theatre and school plays and was convinced that I belonged on the stage. I headed off to college to study musical theatre performance, and it took less than one semester to realize I was in the wrong place. The prospect of turning a few fun moments in the spotlight into a professional pursuit seemed miserable, and I started casting about for a Plan B. The moment I stepped into my first real writing class, I knew I’d found my place. 

There were a lot of reasons for that shift in focus, but a lot of it came down to this: I didn’t want to be the product I was selling. As a writer, I could bring in pages, perhaps even read them out loud for a group…but when critiques began, it was the pages we were talking about. The work. The writing. Not me. As a playwright, I clung to a quote from Marsha Norman who insisted that writers belonged in the dark in the back of the theater. They weren’t meant to be seen. So, it stood to reason that a novelist could be even less visible. It was the pages that mattered, not the author.

I’m sure you can tell where this is going. Cut to several years later, and I’m constantly being encouraged to “put myself out there” and to “put a human face” to my work. I thought I’d escaped the dreaded “b-word” (branding), but it seems writers are no longer allowed, as Marsha Norman encouraged, to stand in the dark and let their work do the talking.

Maybe I was naïve from the start. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so eager to hide so early in my career. After all, Dickens was doing public readings long before the days of BookTok and Instagram Live. But the pressure to be out in front seems to be growing exponentially, and we can probably blame social media for that. (After all, we blame it for everything else.) 

Of course, this brave new world presents opportunities that didn’t exist in generations past. Self-promotion can be exhausting, but it can also be empowering. Authors who used to be at the mercy of marketing budgets and industry gatekeepers can (theoretically) take matters into their own hands, engage with their readers, and build a career online. Sure, this has made the landscape more crowded, and it’s more difficult than ever to get noticed. But that’s all the more reason to post early and often, isn’t it? All the more reason to share as much of yourself as you can in an effort to break through the noise.

So, how much personal information does a writer have to share? It’s something I’m still grappling with. I’m consistently surprised that people even want to know about my life and my creative process. It’s certainly not that interesting when you’re in the midst of it. But I found myself talking a lot about my background, my personal experiences, and my perspective as a debut novelist while I was promoting There’s No Murder Like Show Murder. And I must admit, it was kind of fun coming out of the dark.

All of this is colored, in my mind, by the AI elephant in the room. Putting a “human face” to our work is more important than ever, since it’s something our audiences will never get from computer-generated content. Our humanity is baked into our prose, of course, and discerning readers will always be able to feel that. (Or so I keep telling myself to avoid the doom spiral.) But the more I’m willing to talk about my work—about the experiences, anxieties, and insights that fueled the thing I'm trying to sell—the easier it will be to forge those strong, human connections.

I think about the fallout from the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal and the subsequent trend of live performance music videos and “unplugged” concerts that followed. Bands and artists were eager to prove that they were real musicians. Maybe we should take a page from their book. Maybe sharing personal details is our version of warming up in front of the audience, unplugging the amp, and showing the messy, beautiful humanity that powers our work.