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Today, I miss the privacy of public writing.

Not a paradox — if you write publicly but anonymously (or under a pseudonym no one’s yet cracked), you have a freedom that disappears as soon as you’ve outed yourself (or been outed). 

When your public writing is fully attributable — when you are identified in each and every word — you’re more accountable, sure, but also, your writing loses some of its edge.

I know that my first novel — the one that I thought no one would ever read while I was writing it — while in many ways my worst one remains my most honest one.

(Fiction can be honest; good fiction must be honest. You know that.)

I know that my blog can’t touch some topics, because it’s now read by my parents, occasionally kids and day job colleagues. I can’t go there, I won’t go there — you don’t get to know that about me.

So many experiences, ideas, rough drafts never leave my notebooks now.

Sometimes, I censor myself even in my notebooks.

It happens like this: I’m writing, maybe for myself, but suddenly, an audience obtrudes. I’ve written professionally for all of my adult life. It’s second nature for me to write for the reader. And a journal entry or morning pages rant morphs into a proto-blog post, an article. Honesty is replaced by craft, technique. As it should be — honesty without technique is a bad first draft of a confessional poem shared at a pub’s Open Mic.

Technique with compromised honesty though can become a lie.

Sometimes, I want to write — and share  — the truth. 

And I miss the anonymity of the 2009 “Jane” and my other pseudonyms.

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The opposite argument: If you aren’t willing to sign your name to it, you shouldn’t publish it.

Should you even write it?

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Younger me — journalist me — pre-romance novelist me — was all about the integrity of the real byline.

Older me has increasingly recognized the need for silence, anonymity, self-protection.

Fragile me, today, thinks art can be anonymous.

Exhausted, overstimulated me, who just wants to write stories and has zero desire to be a YouTube, Instagram TIkTok etc marketer and content self-promoter, is starting to think that art doesn’t even have to be shared.

Make it.

Put it in a drawer.

It exists.

That’s enough.

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Her: You don’t really believe that.

Jane: It might be a self-protective lie. I don’t know. But it feels like the truth.

5

The force that doesn’t want to keep art in a drawer is ego. Vanity. But it’s so good. But it can help people. But I made it. But isn’t it special?

Can it be special in a drawer? In a notebook?

Fun fact: I never feel much angst over writing as other people. It brings me a lot of pleasure. And the work is still out there.

I know I’m not fully at peace with writing… and not sharing. If I’m not going to share — sell, publish — why am I writing it in the first place?

Seems unprofessional. Self-indulgent.

Story: I want to exist.

Jane: I know. Here you go. You are told, you exist.

Story: Are you going to show me to anyone?

Jane: Not you. Not yet.

Story: Then am I really here?

I know stories don’t have existential angst. Not really.

Do they?

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Sometimes, I would like to tell you a story without you knowing that I’m the one who made that story.

Sometimes, that’s the only way to tell the full truth.

That’s why so many of our best, most enduring stories are such outrageous fairy tales.

Story: Is that what I am?

Jane: No. You, for now, are a secret. Isn’t that special?

The story does not believe me. But as I haven’t told it to anyone, it doesn’t even exist — so what does it know?

Xoxo

“Jane”