Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Last week I talked about trying to remove yourself, or at least your ego, from your writing, to embrace the other, to try to express viewpoints alien from your own.

This week, I will entertain a rather different idea.

That you cannot escape yourself: that everywhere you go, there you are. Possibly taking the weather with you. You cannot outrun your upbringing, the weight of early cultural exposure and norms. And that is before we get to what you choose to believe, the codes and behaviors you attempt to live by, to honor. However you may have come by those ideas. These are choices you make that you think are your own, untouched by mass media advertising, social media conditioning, your own history. Subtle social influence on our decision making is a tricky Gordian knot to untangle, and I’m not going to try it here.

The bottom line though, is that there is no escape, you are the sum of these things, no more. Wherever you go, there you are, the sum of all your experiences.

Do we therefore write simply express those ideas that are “ours”, filtered through many layers of influence? Are we telling our tales in our ways because there is no alternative for us, as we are doomed to remain trapped in our own frame of reference?

That is a rather bleak view, but it could be taken. There are, after all, a number of arguments out there for why our free will is an illusion, so by extension, all of our acts, even our imaginings, could also be predetermined.

I have, at times in my life, had no problem with the idea of a clockwork universe, whirring on its implacable way, and we just a part of it, scurrying to and fro in our own seemingly random but utterly predictable fashion.

What do I think now? I’m not sure, so can’t say.

But why do we write? For the same reason, I think, that we read: to walk a mile, or more, in another person’s shoes. To participate in an act of imagination, to experience empathy, to see the world through a stranger’s eyes, and be better for it. Even if those eyes are an airport thriller that amuses away a few hours with action, adventure, and impeccable pacing.

We want a diversion, an escape from our lives, our world, into other worlds. Some are simpler, some try to be as complex, but always there are rules to be followed, to be bent and broken, for the pleasure of it, for the enjoyment of the reader. The rules of storytelling. Some readers want to be challenged, others entertained and no more, but none open a book hoping to find an empty mirror of their own experience. Kitchen sink dramas took the familiar and set it on fire with drama and emotion.

So I think that even though we cannot escape ourselves, still we yearn to walk that mile in another’s shoes, be those shoes James Bond’s or Bridget Jones’ I really should have come up with a highbrow alternative there. I know you can dream up your own, dear readers! As writers we must walk those miles, imagine them, explore them, and then share them. We can’t escape ourselves as we do so, but the act of empathy, of placing ourself in a stranger’s world, may be as close as we can come to it.

Here ends another week’s spitballing session. It looks to me like I tried to entertain a different idea, but just said the same thing in a different way. Couldn’t escape my own biases, it seems. Maybe I’ll have better luck next week.

Until then, my friends, keep walking.