Putting It All Out There
Should writers or artists include personal details on the Internet?
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- Autumn
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recently wrote a wonderful post asking a very important question:“How closely do we tie ourselves as individuals to our creations? Or put another way, is our content perceived by our likeability or the actual content?"
It’s a question I think we take for granted. Look how many of us are on Substack right now, our real names attached to our publications, sharing parts of ourselves with whatever number of subscribers we have. There’s such a risk to this level of accessibility and vulnerability that I’m not sure gets discussed enough.
I enjoyed the article because I’ve also struggled with this question. I’ve written some personal essays here, some which made me quite nervous to publish. Should I be vulnerable and provide images from my childhood or my family for anyone to view? Where will those images end up once they are on the Internet? How much of myself should I reveal to an audience I do not know in real life? These are all questions I think about before hitting publish.
I rarely share much of myself to those who know me in real life. I feel like, despite being open and authentic with others, I have never felt like I truly fit in, especially when it comes to group socialization. Because of this, I don’t try very hard to socialize or gain acceptance in the social hierarchies I recognize. So I’m always on the outside of scenes. In many ways, I’ve perfected the art of social distancing and I’m okay with that. But it does take its toll on my creative career. If you aren’t willing to spend time investing in others, they will likely not feel they have to invest in you. Networking with others does matter. Networking in person matters the most.
Kern Carter’s article isn’t about this though. He is asking a question that should be the first question writers and artists grapple with when putting ourselves out on the Internet in any form. Are we trying to make others like us or are we trying to find audiences who want to connect with us around our work? Are we willing to share enough of our lives with the world that people who do not know us can pick us apart?
There are many writers and artists who have centered selfhood in their work. I’m currently reading Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, and while that was published as fiction, it’s clear that it is roman à clef. There is a very thin separation between the protagonist and Plath’s experiences. This veil was necessary in the early 1960s. She could not write a nonfictional account of a mental breakdown at that time. But in our era, the thin veil is no longer necessary. People want to see artists and writers bare everything, often indulging in a sort of reality TV version of themselves online.
But this leads me to wonder if there isn’t some sort of retreat from this on the horizon. A horizon that is coming up fast as technology continues to advance and warp our minds and our sense of reality. How much of our work and ourselves are we willing to give away to an Internet that’s rapidly incorporating AI?
Writers are struggling with this answer. Some of us may be willing to put it all out in the open, but likely we do not wish to have our lives stolen. We want to put our work out to gain audiences. We want to be paid for our work (what a novel idea). But we can’t do either of these without our willingness to take the risk of it being stolen or imitated; gobbled up and reprocessed through some LLM. In this new age we’ve entered, much worse things can happen besides plagiarism though.
An increasing amount of wholesale identity theft including facial identity has become possible through deepfake technology. The more we feed the beast, the more likely we may have a digital doppelgänger controlled by criminals engaged in nefarious behavior. Don’t believe me? Check out this article.
Our issues with AI have only begun. The more you share on the Internet, the more you seemingly belong to Internet. Doesn’t it feel that consciousness as we know it is shifting, careening towards a cliff that has a drop off we can’t even begin to imagine?
I don’t know what the answer is. Only that I know I do not want to tie too much of my personal life to my creative work. I won’t start a 24/7 Twitch to stream the insanely boring life that I lead. Yes, I could make hundreds or thousands a month by allowing people to practice voyeurism. But much of what makes my life interesting (at least to me) is experienced mainly in my own imagination. No one can access this besides myself. I can only make some of my imagination available through my writing or performance work. Maybe I’m someone who was built in and for the 20th century. Before revealing everything to everyone was considered the best way to connect to audiences.
What do you think? Do you believe writers and artists need to be willing to share personal stories from their lives in order to grow their platforms? How much more interested are you in reading Substacks that include vulnerable details?
Your point about a retreat on the horizon is so interesting. I always feel like there's a reaction to every action so you might be on to something.
Back in the day, my Facebook feed was set to “friends only.” It was playwright Jeremy Kareken (Lifespan of a Fact) who encouraged me to make everything public. “As playwrights,” he said, “we are public.” And he was right. There’s a transparency of brand now that the world has not only accepted but expects—especially in creative and startup spaces. We share our failures as proof of concept, as proof of life. And in doing so, our authenticity doesn’t just build audience—it builds family.
I’m also a big believer in sharing work in its infancy—not for metrics or visibility, but as a signal to others (and to myself) that there’s no mystery to good art. It’s not some sacred lightning bolt—it’s a process. You start in a place that energizes you, and you whittle and whittle until it begins to sing.
I share early because if I don’t seek opinion or feedback, I worry I’ll run out of places to probe. Criticism doesn’t threaten me; it fuels me. For me, sharing is a risk I’m willing to take for the sake of my mental health—and my artistic evolution.
My husband and I recently started a queer-forward project called PrideSquatch. We made an intentional decision to put his design into the public domain. Because yeah, it’s probably going to get co-opted, stolen, and slapped on merch we didn’t approve—but that works for us. We want it to spread. We want the message out in the wild. That was part of the mission from the beginning.
So if I take that a step further and someone wants to steal my writing and pass it off as their own? I’ll take a small comfort in knowing it was good enough to steal. Maybe notoriety over obscurity isn’t the worst tradeoff in this bizarre economy of attention—especially in an industry that has long undervalued its artists and deprioritized financial compensation.
So yes, we’re exposing ourselves. But maybe that exposure is also a reclamation. Of self. Of voice. Of agency.
Thanks for naming it so clearly.