Hubris moves in mysterious ways

[rolanni]

So there's a discussion over at jaylake's place about the nature of writers, the contention being that interesting writers are interesting people. I disagreed, based on my own wide-ranging uninteresting-ness (with which kaygo begged to disagree), and the even wider-ranging charm of my characters, based on reader report.

This morning at the gym, I fell to talking with a woman who I had worked with during the Bean Christmas Season. She, retired of something to do with accounting, banking, or perhaps both, is casting about for a summer job, to keep herself busy, and confessed that she was looking forward to November, when she would sign on again with Bean. I may have looked a mite dubious, because she asked what I was doing to keep myself busy.

Well, I said, I've been writing a book.

Oh? On what subject?

I did the short form of husband co-author, twelve books, available at Children's Bookstore right here in town, or at Barnes and Noble and Borders, down to Augusta or Portland, and gave her a card.

That was interesting. As in, my being a writer was interesting to someone who is not a writer, and she instantly grasped why I might not be eager to go "out" to work.

Then she realized that, though we had worked together and see each other occasionally at the gym, I had never been properly "placed", which she speedily proceeded to do: Where did I live? Did I know so-and-so? Where had I lived before? Was I related to the Albion Lees or the Waterville Lees?

So, being a writer is interesting, perhaps, to those in other lines of work. But I still don't believe that one needs to be a deeply interesting person in order to write compelling stories. An observer with a good ear, yes. Possessed of esoteric information and a store of bon mots and witticisms, which are delivered with charm and grace in face-to-face situations -- no.

Comments

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

I don't think writers are any better judges of how interesting they are to the world at large than they are of their own work. says dancinghorse,

and I agree. Also with janni when she points out that interesting can be a matter of perspective.

Surely we have all been in a situation where we've read a book we found interesting only to discover someone else who found it uninteresting. And I certainly have been in situations where I had a darned good idea that the people I was talking with found me dead boring. Naturally, this causes me to gravitate toward people who at least make a pretense of pretending to my face that I am interesting.

Last autumn, at a convention in Utah, I went to a talk given by the writer Allan Cole about how his youth (growing up as the child of a CIA agent and living in various hot spots around the world) had influenced his decision to become a writer and the kind of writer he was.

At one point in the conversation, an audience member asked him about some contradictory and not particularly nice person he had described, and Cole smiled and said, enthusiastically, "People are just so damned interesting, aren't they?"

As soon as he said it, and given the way he said it, I knew I would have to read at least one of his books. Because HE FOUND people interesting. Not because he was, or was not, interesting (although of course he was).