Which is the better vantage point for the writer: being an outsider or insider? Do the prophets in the wilderness or the embedded reporters make better writers?
This is an important question for us writers because it's pertains not only to how you write but to how you should live. Should you seek happiness, the society of others, and success? Or should you seek isolation and individual expression?
I've always been captivated by the lone genius: the Marlboro man writer, staring out into the grass plain, watching the sky turn to night, writing a few slow lines in his notebook while the day comes to a close. I perceived writing as a lonely, earthy, sensual task, only possible when given room for contemplation.
Then, I became a father and everything changed.
The Consequences of Connectedness
Fatherhood, with its daily details of feeding, changing diapers, earning money to pay for those diapers, has tied me to my neighbors, my family, to humanity closer than I thought possible. I'm certainly a better person after becoming a father.
But am I a better writer? The connectedness is both satisfying and suffocating. I'm more normal, less unique, less creative.
We were in the car a few evenings ago. The highway was very dark. Marston slept on in the back. Somehow my writing came up, and Talia asked if having a son helped or hurt my writing. “I think it will probably make it better but less original. I'm less creative, less avant-garde, but I know myself better, I understand the world better.”
Does the best writing come from writers who have empathy and are connected with humanity? or from writers who are weird and artistic and unique?
Insider Writers and Outsider Writers
There are examples of great writers on either side. William Blake, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon are just a few of the most reclusive writers, and their creativity seems to stem in large part from their solitude. But there are also great writers who thrived on the inside, writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Salman Rushdie.
In fact, you could argue much of literature is written by outsiders looking in or insiders looking out. Jane Austen, for example, wrote books about love and marriage but had only one brief, failed romance and then lived the rest of her life as a spinster. An outsider, clearly, but one with a front row view into the love lives of the rich.
Hemingway, on the other hand, was a perpetual insider, the center of all the parties, correspondent of the most famous literary luminaries of his day, the apple of the public's eye. And yet most of his books are about disconnection and loneliness. An insider who feels like an outsider?
Charles Dickens may have had the best of both worlds. Raised in an upper-middle class English family, he received all the benefits of education and connection to society. However, when his father was arrested for failing to pay his debts, his family lived as paupers for several years. As a very young boy, he even had to work as a clerk. Perhaps that's why so many of his characters are on the brink, balancing on the edge of wealth and disaster, always seeming as if they're about to fall over.
Should You Be an Outsider or Insider?
Perhaps the insider/outsider question is a false dichotomy. If Cormac McCarthy can write masterpieces in his solitude and Salman Rushdie write them while dating supermodels and going to international parties, then maybe it's not about being in or out.
Perhaps the secret is to never stop being you, whether or not you're inside or outside.
As one of my favorite insider novelist, Chaim Potok, wrote in My Name is Asher Lev:
… An artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
When you are on the inside, don't forget that you are still you. You are an individual. It may be easier to hide your beliefs, your feelings, your stories from your family, friends, and society for the sake of the group, but to do so is creative suicide. Instead, what if you wrote something that would make your group very uncomfortable?
And when you are on the outside (and we are all on the outside sometimes), don't strive to conform in order to get back inside. Grieve the disconnection, feel the pain of loneliness, and then capture it for your writing.
Are you an insider or an outsider? How does your perspective help your writing?
PRACTICE
You have two options for today's practice. You can:
- Write about what it's like to be an outsider looking in.
- Write about what it's like being an insider but still feeling disconnected.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you're finished, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, be sure to leave feedback on a few practices by other writers.
Dave is lying and I don’t think anyone knows but me. Angela is asking him about his family. She’s pretty and we’re in a bar on a Saturday night, so Dave is obligated to lie.
“I haven’t been home since Thanksgiving,” he says while the connection between his and Angela’s eyes do not shift one bit. His arm is creeping across the top of the booth that we are all sitting on, towards Angela’s shoulder, but her eyes do not slip from his.
Truth is, yesterday he told me that his brother was caught red-handed doing heroin. He was in disbelief; his entire family was. It wasn’t completely uncommon in the area that we were from, a suburbia caught between the idleness of grimy shopping districts and fast-food restaurants and the first promises of the country and wildlands of the mountains where police and and laws felt out-of-touch with the winding dirt roads, escalating and empty hills,.
Angela had fierce eyes, intensified by her mascara, so that the whites of her eyes made the gray rims of her pupils standout like those rings that circle the moon before it rains.
I stood up and told them that the next round was on me and Dave told me that he loved me (“I love you, bro”) and Angela told me how nice I was (“you are so sweet”), but really I just wanted a reason to leave them alone.
Over the last few months, we’d been coming to this bar, “The Lonely Soldier” progressively more often. By now, we knew several bartenders by name and shift, we knew the regulars by their young faces and nightly intentions, and we knew the parking lot in the back, the dumpsters, the alleyways, the cigarette burns on the pavement with the same type of intimacy that we shared with our lost childhood friends.
I passed a few people that I’d spoken to before as I paced the bar, but their backs were turned and all we had really talked about was a combination of sports, weather, the pros and cons of red wine and vodka, but I had a feeling that they still didn’t remember my name. If they had seen me though, I would had thrown my arms around them and asked why the hell had I not seen them the last time I was here, and they would probably laugh and we might get in an argument about who buy the other a drink and maybe the bartender would overhear and say something witty about not being able to give us free drinks anymore like all the other times even though that had never happened to me in this place, and we would probably all be laughing and happy in some sort of way, but I walked by them unnoticed and went to the bathroom.
I like your writing style.
Thanks to the both of you! It was a fun exercise.
Mmm.. this is really good, and I like looking at it from an insider / outsider perspective. He knows Dave better than anyone, so he’s an insider, but in the conversation, he’s an outsider. In the bar itself he’s on the verge of becoming an insider, but he’s feeling in an outsider-ish mood. It’s fun parsing it out.
Thanks so much, Adam!
Great line: “. . . the first promises of the country and wildlands of the mountains where police and laws felt out-of-touch with the winding dirt roads, and escalating and empty hills.”
I think this is an excellent layered account of simultaneously being on the inside and feeling alienated, or at least isolated.
Thanks John for pointing that out, that’s exactly what I was going for. I’m glad someone else could read into it like that.
You can feel the disconnectedness in this piece. Nicely done!
I think you can succeed as either one. I don’t think you necessary choose to be an insider or outsider, either. I think you are who you are, and that’s what fuels your creativity. I’ll try my chances with number 2.
I’m happy where I am. Julia sits to my right, blabbing to Trish about the party she hosted last weekend. The truth is that Julia’s party really did rock, but something about the entire night left me uneasy. I spent most of the night sitting in a corner watching other people play pool and goof off in Julia’s basement, but I was happy sitting in the corner alone, and I’m happy where I am now.
I sit in silence as Julia and Trish giggle across the table from each other. I want to weigh in, but I pick up a carrot off my tray and nibble on that instead.
My gaze shifts to the table behind Trish, and I catch a glimpse of Hannah Harris’s signature beanie. My mind reflects back to a time in elementary school when I would sit by Hannah every day at lunch, and I think for a moment that I’d like to go sit by her and enjoy her laid back, bubbly personality. At least I’d feel like I could talk at her table. But there’s no room for me there.
So I stay put and listen to blonde haired, blue eyed, pink frilly clones laugh about their immaturity. I’m happy where I am.
It was fun reading this and getting an insight into your world, Alicia. I’m glad to hear your embracing your individuality. 🙂
Just throwing this out there that these characters are fictional. 🙂
Oh man, the life of teenager girls could reveal what it’s like to go from insider to outsider and back better than anything
You exude self-confidence and contentment (if not necessarily happiness) in this writing, both of which are enviable. Good, clear, descriptive writing.
Happy where I am.
That sentence struck me as interesting. You want to weigh in, but you can’t. You want to sit at the table, but you won’t. No room.
But you are happy.
I think happy to not get involved, happy to watch, but not happy as in contented.
This post got me thinking if writing with an insider frame of mind almost always results in stories with a first person POV (point-of-view), whereas thinking as an outsider results in a third-person narrative. What do all of you feel?
Interesting question! The book that comes to mind first is Catcher In the Rye, which is definitely outsider (both the protagonist and author). Hemingway, who I would call more of an insider, wrote with both 3rd and 1st person. Although perhaps his most insider-ish book, Sun Also Rises, incidentally his first, was in first person. Most of the other insiders I mentioned, though, were definitely primarily first person writers. You may definitely be on to a trend!
As a writer, which do you feel is easier – First person or third person narrative?
Joe, how would you classify Richard Ford’s Canada?
When Mom F found that I remembered something of Puttersville* from my visits to my siblings, I was the one to receive her copy of the local history. She knew she wouldn’t have much longer to remain in this world and wanted to hand this volume on to someone who’d appreciate it.
When I got it home I looked up my family in the weighty tome. “Allen and Louise had five children” it said, and listed my brother and my four sisters. So I turned to my Uncle & Aunt’s write up. “The Forsyths had one son, Verne.”
I shut the book with a sigh. No one remembered Allen & Louise’s oldest daughter, the one raised by her aunt & uncle. The story of my life. I’d never existed in either world. I was no relation to all the “cousins” in Dad F’s family; Verne certainly didn’t regard me as a sister. I knew almost nothing of my birth mother Louise’s family.
It’s an odd feeling to belong nowhere. Then my “outside” position among my own peers was established at the time of my birth. My father drove a nail deep into the wall where I hung my ‘unique’ when he gave me an archaic name that my schoolmates found hilarious. My Uncle took up the hammer and pounded in a second peg by saying, “If you’re going to call her that, then call her Aggie, too.”
My mother was Louise Agnes, but Aggie’s what they called her when they wanted to really diss her. That name embodied slob & slut and worthless all rolled into one blob. Just the name a girl wants to wear, right? A double whammy that almost guaranteed I’d be a loner.
(Yeah, my poor mom was an irresponsible bar-rat, having been beaten over the head too many times in her youth. Picture a nine-year-old raising—and mostly neglecting—a large family. As a baby I suffered the worst, which is why I ended up with my aunt & uncle.)
There are various reasons why a person ends up an outsider. The emotional abuse my uncle regularly handed out in his efforts to correct the error of my ways. Spending a lot of time alone. My Aunt worked a lot; I hardly ever saw her. I was left alone for hours on end when I was young, which gave me lots of time to develop an imagination, but few social skills.
For a few blessed weeks every summer and often for a week over Christmas I was an Insider together with my siblings, but once they went home again I was very alone. When I got older I found my solace in books. My imagination met the written word and a relationship began that I still cherish.
I married an only child, so we commiserate. We adopted a daughter, so she commiserates. We’ve also moved about twenty times, especially in the first ten years, so roots put down were pulled up often and the story of my life has continued. Neither here nor there. I take part wherever possible, but definitely never feel like an Insider.
*Name changed to protect the guilty. 🙂
Good work, a very honest description of what it feels like to be a lifelong outsider. It evokes empathy and compassion from the reader.
The flood of personal insult after the postings of one’s views on the feminization of men.
The glares when one walks out on the Christian prayers at a city-sponsored function.
“Maybe if you’d cut that hair and straighten up, y’wouldn’t be so alone!”
Reproofs of relatives on “slipping” and expressing oneself: “I don’t see why we can’t sit down and have a nice Thanksgiving meal without . . .”
The decision to cut oneself off from those relatives completely.
The realization that one has lived into the wrong century, and life will only get harder from here on out. It has become much more prudent to live “safe” than to live large. But the hunger continues unabated.
The fear of first writing and then offering that book for publication — the howls of those who were there and are still alive, the rebuffs for being “too negative”, “anti-family”, “weird”, “too out there”. — when one has no hearts or teddy bears to offer.
Great snippets, John. You’ve captured some powerful emotions here. I would have liked to see a scene, though, get more of the story. Snippets can work as accents, but to pass along the feelings to your reader, I think stories can work better. I enjoyed that last line, “when one has no hearts or teddy bears to offer.” I wonder what it would be like if it was flipped, “when one has no teddy bears or hearts to offer.” Putting the lighter noun before the darker one gives it a twist, I think.
Thanks so much for sharing this!
You’re right. Those snippets are just the bare scaffolding of what’s important, the story.
I think you’re right about “teddy bears and hearts” too.
Thanks!
Well, to be perfectly honest, I don’t see why you can’t be both empathetic and unique… But okay XD It’s an interesting concept… I’ll think on it a little more before I do a practice, I think 😛
Quite right. I didn’t mean to make that exclusive. Still, you have to admit the people most bent on originality can tend to be narcissistic. Picasso, Pollock, Salinger, even Dickens, to some extent. These are not the most sacrificing of people. Looking forward to seeing your practice!
Haha, thanks! Yeah, you’re right, but I have a friend who is stupidly creative and also one of the empathetic people I know… That’s why I said it 😛 It hadn’t actually ever occurred to me that it’s not normal before I read this article.
I consider myself an outsider–but more as a choice than anything else. I’m an only child and was an early, voracious reader, so solitude never bothered me. Along the way, as a writer, I am very comfortable as an observer of others in any social situation. Everyone has a unique way that they approach their art, but I’ve noticed that my writing and artist friends who are more outgoing seem to find less time to spend on their craft, being less willing to give up social time, I suppose. I’ve enjoyed the practices that are posted! A thought provoking post today, Joe.
Thanks Mer. Go only children! I have two half-sisters, but they’re quite older, so like you, I spent most of my early life as an outsider.
I can empathise with you both. As someone near the bottom of a hierarchy of six children who was constantly shoved aside and overlooked, I ended up being an observer. I also found escape in reading. Perhaps that’s why today I find myself an outsider looking in.
My life has always centered around family, parents, husband, three children, six grandchildren. I can write stories about families, love and relationships, teenage angst and several other topics which have been part of 77 years of living.. Here I write as an insider. I’m an outsider to adventure, to fighting a war, to sub-cultures, to the jet set, . But I read about these things and can imagine. I can research events and places and lives of others to garner details of another time and place. Does that make me an outsider writing as an imposter insider? If the stories are good, then, whether written as an outsider or an insider is of no importance. Who, but the author and friends of the author, know if he is an outsider looking in or an insider looking out.
Adelaide B. Shaw
http://www.adelaidewritewritewrite.blogspot.com
Hi Adelaide, I am an active dreamer and vividly remember several dream sequences when I awaken. I don’t think you’re an imposter insider when writing about lives you haven’t “lived” because I believe that your living is in the experience of reading and researching other times and places. You brought yourself along on that journey and having lived it in different time and space in no way negates your having lived, experienced and responded emotionally and intellectually to the experiences. It’s wonderful that your family has been the center of your life!
I watch them. They strut and preen and flock about like an ostentation of peacocks, flashing a razzmatazz of feathers and finery and fluff, some borrowed, some naturally endowed. Here I sit, a plain Jane sparrow. They overshadow me. They could crush me in a moment with sharp claws and fierce meows.
I am so plain that they shouldn’t notice me, so small that I should blend in with the unpainted oak door. At least my streaky brown dress would help with the camouflage. But it’s like they are wearing special contacts or something. They can see the abnormalities in each other, but they chose not to point them out lest they all turn on each other.
So to me they direct their attention. To me the derisive laughs, the hard, angry stares are directed. Look at her. She didn’t even try to blend. She must think that she is better than the rest of us.
Better? No. Equal? No. Wanting to blend? No. Wanting to be left alone? Yes.
The insiders. None of them thinks that they are better than the rest. Each girl preens because she is afraid. Afraid of what people would think if they actually knew. Knew that she is pitted with acne, scarred by a careless childhood accident, wrinkled with worry, swollen with regrets and maybe bulimia too. They hate me because I know. I know who they are, and I know who I am. I am not them and they are not me.
We will never be each other. So they chose to tread on me, exterminate me, hate me. And I hop about, gathering up cracked kernels of corn, stare at butterflies, and spread my own wings and fly into the sunbeams.
Beautiful and strong. I like how, even with the things going against this person, they know who they are.
She’d pulled a double-shift and was well past the point where sleep would be a natural result of bone-throbbing exhaustion. Sleep never came easy to Reggie, but when they were on a case, it was like her brain forgot how to get to where sleep hid.
Unlocking the door to her place, she stepped over and added to the growing pile discarded clothing that began at her front door and trailed down the hallway to the bathroom door. She twisted on the hot water to full force, opened the medicine cabinet over the sink, avoiding her reflection, then dry-swallowed a couple of antihistamine tablets. Pulling off the tank top and stepping out of her panties, Reggie crept into the shower. The shock of the hot water painfully scalded her skin, but she didn’t adjust it, pressed her arms straight in front of her, palms against the tiles, then leaned forward to let the water stream over her head. Her body ached from the fatigue of sustained tension, but there were worse kinds of pain.
Images from the crime scene played behind her eyelids. It was by far the worst one she’d seen. The female victim couldn’t have been much more than fourteen or fifteen. The blood, the maggots, the obvious rodent involvement with the remains___
Pressing my eyes hard into the back of my hands, trying to rub away a collage of images that gave mute testimony to a hideous murder designed to inflict the maximum misery on a child. Somebody’s little girl, slowly, viciously tortured and left to die.
The hot water was gone, and my skin was stinging and scalded, but I didn’t let the cooling water get cold before turning the water off. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried to exchange physical pain for the psychological rape that went with my job. I began to retch, and watched the fuchsia, partially digested pills dissolving in the bottom of the shower.
I knew that I had less than ten hours to get a grip on this, to regain some professional detachment before my partner, Denton, came to pick me up for the morning and what should promise to be a tense debriefing. The Crime Scene pictures would be up on the whiteboard, at least the initial forensics available. Denton and I had caught the call, we’d be “on”–giving our impressions to the rest of the department. I turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, pulled on an over-sized terry-cloth robe, twisted my hair into a towel and shuffled to my bedroom, not bothering to straighten the twisted bedsheets. My computer was on, but with a blue-screen, so I pressed a button; the simple, haunting opening piano chords of the Elmer Bernstein Suite began as the opening credits rolled. Scout’s voice said:
“Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning; ladies bathed before noon, after their 3 o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go and nothing to buy… and no money to buy it with….”
Soon the sonorous voice of Atticus Finch would lull me into what passed as sleep. This was my “sleeping aid” of choice–when it worked. The movie was set to a continuous loop and with luck, I’d get at least three hours.I laid down and in moments, felt my day mercifully drop away.
I would like my experiences as a nonprofit leader, my successes and failures to be helpful, useful to other grassroots organizations. In our work, we see firsthand the scale of poverty and the needs permeating, surrounding the City of New Orleans. Against the backdrop of limitation, we have build great social and cultural traditions: the Mardi Gras Indians, social aid and pleasure clubs and jazz and brought joy to ourselves and countless others. Those traditions continue inside and against a context of struggle. My road has been a difficult one that started twenty years ago with ideas, visions of helping improve chances for young people from my neighborhood. I went to school, worked and took care of my children while also considering, dreaming of how I could help others, how I could give back to the place my family has called home for over one hundred years.
Now that I have something to share, a body of experiences, and am ready to share it with other fledgling or struggling organizers and organizations, I experience the challenge of communicating to native born, elders who would like to continue working in outdated fashion from a pre-Internet and technology era believing that organizing the voices bodies of people to march, make phone calls, attend hearings, is enough to bring about social change. What they fail to consider is the structure needed to grow and sustain organizations, to give them legitimacy in the eyes of patrons and government. They fail to consider the need for steady cash flow to support operations and continue to operate like storefront churches passing the hat for offering to support the work while volunteering their time to address the needs of the people. The needs are well documented and established. Getting folks to consider in advance how the programs will be paid for, including their salaries, when they are accustomed to flying by the seat of their pants is
another ballgame, entirely.
I have managed to separate the organizations working in my neighborhood with which I can work and desire to lend my assistance from the ones where difference of origin, culture and values make a conversation tense and fruitless. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward attracted the attention of the world; offers of support flowed and many flocked from around the country to set up organizations to help. Those organizations typically had no local representation on their boards of directors and often
hired people like themselves, from far-flung places around the country, the world. They had come to help us: the helpless, backward and defenseless. And we were largely to blame because we had failed to organize ourselves with intention of partnering, collaborating across programs and funding sources to benefit us all. We chose to establish and operate our own programs individually because we each knew what was best. We individualistically competed for the endorsement of a desperate storm ravaged people with each leader believing that she held the one true and indisputable definition
of community.
This is a thought provoking article. I think I’ve found it easier to write when I feel like an outsider.
Thanks Giulia. Yes, I think there’s something about feeling like an outsider that makes it easier to write. Or at least easier to get started.
I have roommates in a three room flat in Eastern Europe. They are always there. I can hear in the morning as I am trying to get some last moments of peaceful rest, and when I trying to fall blissfully into silent dreams. Throughout the day we live by avoiding each other. We barely say hello, or good morning before escaping into separate rooms.
Then there is this other side to me. I yearn for conversation, to be seen and heard. I want to know what the strange words they say mean, and for them to completely understand me. I no longer want to be the invisible visible. The foreigner in the strange world, who dress and looks different. I never know the right things to say or do. I feel as though I am a red dot in a bowl full of white rectangles.
My paper ticket tell me I will escape soon.