Too Much Information: A Long and Rambling Post

Recently, I posted on a series of forums and listservs asking what people wanted--and didn't want--from authors on their websites. I didn't get very much information back, and what I did get was contradictory.

• Some readers don't want to know about their favorite authors' failing marriages, some do.
• Some readers don't care about the writing process, they only care about the final product, while others find the ins and outs of creative endeavor fascinating.
• Some readers prefer to think of characters and the words they live in as self-generated, or "real." They like websites dedicated to the world of the novel, written in character, with never a break in the fourth wall.

So how is an author to navigate these contradictory opinions? What if your readers fall into the "we don't care about your kid's dyslexia" camp, but he's your son and his dyslexia has an impact on your life? Well, the good news is that readers who don't care about those things can skip them (I know, it seems obvious, but you'd be surprised at how people torture themselves over this stuff), but you do have to provide content for others, too. That is, the readers who don't come for posts about cheesy television depictions of writers may enjoy news about contests, excerpts from works in progress, reviews of almost forgotten books, jokes, jabs, links, multimedia...you get the idea.

Authors sit in a peculiar spot on the privacy continuum. If privacy is possible for anyone in today's society--and I am not at all convinced that it is--it is certainly not possible for authors, at least not for those who want to be financially successful. What part of your life (and I am not asking you to answer this question aloud, just to think about it) do you want to keep private? What part are you absolutely, positively unwilling to share? What part will never, ever appear on your website, no matter how successful your books become?

The answer may turn out to be something you don't expect.

Years ago, when I started blogging, I did so because it was required for my job as an administrator at an academic computing lab. I figured I'd do the minimum--post once a week on subjects related to the job. But it didn't work out that way. And once I started posting on subjects outside the lab, I found that lots of topics I thought would be off-limits...weren't. I wrote about life as an epileptic and as a graduate student and as a New Yorker transplanted to Texas. I wrote about exploratory abdominal surgery and memory loss. I wrote about (I kid you not) being released from the hospital with a catheter in and no bag attached, and not having any idea there was anything wrong with that situation because I was in a postictal state. A lot of people would have said that some of those posts were TMI--too much information--but I also got thank you notes from complete strangers saying "I had no idea a a seizure could affect you that way; now I realize I should see a neurologist."

And just the other day I saw someone mention on a readers' forum that they will continue to read a certain author although they merely like her books nowadays (where once they loved them) because they so strongly support the civil rights causes in which she is active. The author in question hits the NYT bestseller list with every release, and she certainly wasn't so open about her politics early in her career, but she's using her website to speak out about something that is important to her. It made me realize that I was sorry to have given up the more personal side of my original blog.

Why am I rambling on about this stuff? Well, partially because I am in rambling mode. But also partially because I think it's very easy to get caught up in the "rat race" aspects of a writing career, and not just the "book a year contract" Clare discussed earlier. When that happens, it's easy to forget why you got into the race in the first place.

When you ask people when they began writing and why they continue to do it, the answers are fairly uniform: "I've always created stories; I write because I have to." But recently, Jessica Faust posed what I find a much more complex and intriguing question: Why do you seek publication? I can't answer that question. I'm not even sure I want to try. But there's something there about a complex system of community, validation and feedback.

Of course, a group blog is a different animal altogether than a personal website, and has different constraints and different readership. But if you have a website, and a readership you sense falls into the "stay away from TMI" category, you might want to create a section somewhere off the main page for the stuff you need to say--for your own sanity.