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EXPRESS YOURSELF
Can You Write About People?
This writer’s take: You can write whatever you want. But you have to keep a few things in mind.
You may have heard about the “Bad Art Friend” scandal, I mean, clickbait, I mean, Twitter fun.
I know that my friends and I can’t seem to stop texting about it (complete with “don’t subpoena this group chat” gallows humor). I write autofiction, also called fiction, and personal essays. I blog here and I pretty much use my life and the life of my friends, lovers, family, and enemies as the subject matter for much of my work. This is what writers do. You can try to stop us, but you never will because art has its demands and this is one of them.
But I understand all of the worry and fear around fucking up, getting caught doing something shitty, people being mad at you, and just the generalized anxiety that comes from publishing things. I can’t say this ever really goes away, but it gets easier to manage, and the cycles of joy, self-loathing, excitement, fear, and stasis are much shorter. I don’t feel much shame anymore either which is a huge win for me as a writer and a human.
Writing about yourself and publishing it is one of the acts that separate the wheat from the chaff. I’ve never ever used that phrase before and perhaps chaff is lovely too, but you get my point. Writers take risks and for that, we are rewarded with hatred, lawsuits, books, perhaps some attention, really invasive and personal questions, readers, not very much money, no money, or for the lucky and determined few, a bit more money.
It takes a lot of guts and a ton of work — physical and emotional — to write books, find agents and publishers, revise, revise, revise, work with an editor, launch, and promote your life on social media, in bookstores, and online.
To return, can you write about people?
Yes.
But here are some things to keep in mind:
Can you be sued? Yes, you can, but it’s really unlikely. I was sued for defamation by a…
