Showing your (writing) hand…

I’ve physically met a few of the people whose blogs I read regularly. Pat Rothfuss is one of them. I mention him specifically, because I was sharing his political post with my wife and ended up saying: “The way he writes? He’s exactly like that in real life, too. It is the awesome.”

Which, aside from relating my levels of geekery in actually saying “the awesome” (and I would’ve said ‘teh awesums!!1!’ if it was possible), got me to thinking about the rest of the people I know who blog. Which led to a bit of a self-evident revelation: You’re all like your writing.

Or, rather, we’re all like our writing. Sure, I’ve said this blog is me thinking out loud to myself a few times, but, well, it *is*. I really do careen between discussing Mead’s implications for political candidates to … well, ninjas. Or dinosaurs. Maybe this doesn’t hold for intermittent blogs – ones where occassional posts are obviously given time to be thought out… but for anyone who updates nearly daily (or more), there simply isn’t time to filter the underlying sensibilities of the person. While this seems self-evident once said (or written), we seem to carry around these contradictory opinions about it in our head. That perhaps writers aren’t like what they… well, write… and then the opposite. That is, that we are like what we write.

It’s our own damn fault, really. While we’re quick to point out that our characters aren’t ourselves (strengthening point A), we definitely infuse a lot of bits from ourselves into our characters (strengthening point B). But when we’re no longer talking about straight fiction – when we’re talking about people blogging on a nearly daily basis – we aren’t pulling a Locke and Demosthenes.

I think this is generally a good thing. Too often, fans “know” an artist only through their work… and that can lead to a really, really skewed picture of someone. Having them essentially writing fireside chats – in their real persona – still leaves the problem of fandom knowing far more about an artist than the artist knows about fandom, but at least it gives us a real idea of the real person there.

Of course, if you’re trying to disguise your political leanings… well, not so much there. ;P