Something you may have learned fairly quickly as a new writer is that, whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, you’re recording a piece of your inner world…your inner self. Yes. YOU.
This happens whether you mean to, or not.
You may have also learned that an astute reader will recognize this, and know that they can peer inside you a bit, and understand some things that make you “tick”… especially if they read a lot of your writing.
For some beginning writers this can be a scary thing, even downright disturbing. It may cause them to try to change their style, or to mask it. Even worse, if the writer develops too much anxiety over it, it may block their flow for a time.
Of course this unsettled feeling comes about because we humans have a natural protective instinct to not allow total strangers to know too much about ourselves, and yet, here we are writing about things that may be bubbling up from very personal depths.
I can remember the first time I made this realization. I was taking a correspondence course in writing. It was in the days when people were still using envelopes and stamps to do so…
