As writers, we would do well to remember that our art conceals a hidden paradox: What is most private and personal in us is also the most universal. Our deepest truth, which seems to be the most hidden and idiosyncratic thing about us, is actually what resonates with all people. In our writing, it’s when we delve deeply into ourselves that our work makes a profound connection with others.
Haven’t you experienced this in your own life as a reader? Don’t you find that when you come across writing that is palpably personal, writing that clearly shares the writer’s most intimate views, thoughts, and feelings, that’s where you can see yourself most clearly? The sense of connection is practically hypnotic.
This is why pandering to others in an effort to appeal directly to them and/or to extract their money is counterproductive. It alienates the reader and makes the writing sterile, whereas the act and art of writing honestly instills life in what we write, which transmits its energetic charge to our readers.
The psychologist Carl Rogers put it well in his classic 1961 book On Becoming a Person:
I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.
For a deeper look at this phenomenon, not only in the art and craft of writing but in the practice of spirituality, see “The Writer’s Paradox: Personal Is Universal.”
