On being reserved

I'm in the process of finishing an email interview for SCI FI Wire. (I'll post a link to the interview when it appears.) As part of the process of writing responses to the questions, I showed a draft to Dave and several others who are close to me. The unanimous opinion was that I should make the answers more personal, show more of myself, and generally not be so reserved.

I agree with those opinions. As a reader, I love learning about my favorite writers. As a writer, I want readers to love to learn them about me. (Heck, like all writers I want everyone to love me; it's a neurosis that's the ante to play in the game.)

The problem is, I often can't tell when I'm pulling back.

Dave correctly noted that this blog, which contains more personal information than any text I've ever offered publicly, is far from out there. If anything, it's measured and controlled. I don't do that consciously; I simply try to be reasonable in what I write, and I try to offer something that might be of use to readers. This navel-gazing entry, for example, feels somewhat self-indulgent--but as a reader, I'd enjoy reading similar things from my favorite writers, so I'm going ahead and doing it.

I'm also rather measured and reserved in most of the opinions I express, but that's not because I don't have strong feelings. Instead, I hold back because I don't think it's ever okay to be a flaming asshole--though I must admit that I have been in the past and almost certainly will be again in the future--and because most issues have multiple sides and are more complex than most people seem to want to admit.

Did you catch that "seem" in the last sentence? That's classic reserve, classic me, but it's for a reason: I'm guessing what people want, I don't know for sure that I'm right, and so I feel a qualifier is in order. (I try to take those same words out of my fiction, when I do know what the character is thinking.) The result of the word choice, however, is distance, distance between you and me.

I'm doing another pass on the interview, and I'm going to try to be less reserved. We'll see how it goes.