Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On Writing and Being a Social Creature:

p.16-17

DFW: There is an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something—much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it. So that you end up with this, uh…I think exhibitionists who aren’t shy end up being performers. End up playing their trade in the presence of other people.

Lipsky: There’s that John Updike quote: “Shyness, and a savage desire to hold another soul in thrall…”

DFW: But there’s also the shyness feed into some of the stuff that you need as a fiction writer. Like: Part of the shyness for me is, it’s very easy for me to play this game of: What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It’s this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse, makes things very difficult. But, in writing when I think a lot of what you’re doing—there are very few innocent sentences in writing. You gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you’ve got to be able plausibly to project what an alien consciousness will make of it. So there’s a kind of split consciousness that I think makes it difficult to deal with people in the real world. For a writer. But that actually comes in handy.

Of Course You End up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky