To the man of sincerity, the man confessing: what do I care about what you’ve done, what you’ve coveted, dared, omitted, regretted, wept over etc.? That’s your business. What has the shape of your nose to do with me?
What presumption to think that your taste for young lambs interests or shocks me! Your remorse, your desires, your experiences of happiness, what are they to me?
What use to me is your emotional turmoil? Tell me about something else.— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 2
Good nonfiction writing is messy in its psychology. It requires a willingness to put your villany on the soapbox, to dig your fingers into wounds and show the dirt you mixed in your blood, the mess you smeared into your life.
Nunberg complains that too many “writers” are mere “bloggers,” incapable of anything more interesting than “Dear Diary” self-indulgence. I would raise a finger and say that they’re all writers, but most of them are just bad at it. More importantly, this excerpt itself is the epitome of the kind of writing I hate. When I hear the sound of confessional prose, I reach for my flamethrower. If you insist on sticking your dirty wordfingers into your prose bloodstream, I hope you die of sepsis, and furthermore, if you refer in earnest to your “wounds,” I hope you linger in agony before expiring. Talk about your “messy” life with Oprah or your therapist and leave me out of it. Don’t address me again until you’ve pulled yourself together.
She bangs on at length about how a writer asks the readers for an “investment” of time and empathy and therefore owes it to them to consider what’s in it for them. Reader, I must “keep it real” with you: I have no idea what you’re interested in here, and I almost certainly wouldn’t take it into consideration if I did know. I trust that if I’m interested in something, I can make it interesting to others given a few hundred words. One of my long-timers told me once that he wasn’t interested in my posts about Nietzsche or lifting weights. Unfortunately for him, all that made me do was smile and think, “Challenge accepted.” Now, one of my minor standing ambitions is to write something on those topics that catches his interest despite himself. (Sorry, buddy, but you brought this on yourself, really.)
Nunberg’s “transactional” model encourages a conventional inference: if the reader says X loses him, give him less X. My backward instinct says: the reader says X loses him; can I write X so well that I drag him along anyway? It’s utterly foreign to my mind to approach readers like a merchant hawking my wares. My philosophy is: I write to please only myself, but give me three paragraphs, and I may get you anyway.