What the Author Hoped You Wouldn’t Notice

It’s funny how much of an author’s character we read into his works.

We’ve all done it, and often with good reason.

Knowing Mark Twain believed in racial equality helps us understand The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a satire.

Knowing Arthur Miller’s purpose in writing The Crucible enables us to view the play primarily as a political statement—not as the religious commentary of a Puritan-hater.

Awareness of Edgar Allan Poe’s traumatic loss of both his mother and his wife to tuberculosis casts an informative light on his morose poems and stories—especially those involving the deaths of young women.

But what happens if you reverse the process?

That is, what can you infer about a writer’s character from his or her stories?

This is a dangerous question.

Not that it’s always invalid. If you know your classics, you’d call this an Aristotelian approach, as opposed to a Platonic one. (And no, I do not mean Platonic in the non-romantic sense of the word!)

Here’s a little logic lesson:

In a Platonic approach, you start with what you know about the source (in this case, the author) and use that knowledge to interpret the product (in this case, the book, poem, or script). But in an Aristotelian approach, you start with the concrete data in front of you and try to reason backwards to understand what created that data—to understand the mind and character of the author.

So why is this dangerous?

It’s dangerous because it can reveal things about the writer that he didn’t think anyone would notice—or at least, hoped no one would connect to him.

Maybe an insecurity in one of his characters. Maybe a failed love interest (don’t writers love to sneak their exes in!). Maybe a moral dilemma or personal failing.

Now I’m no Freudian psychologist— but I am an author. One of my friends asked me after reading The Exile if one of the narrator’s quirks was my own. Guilty as charged. Well, not really guilty, considering it was just a quirk and not a moral issue. But still, I’d been caught.

Of course, I refused to answer the question, saying that the characters were their own individuals and not simply facets of myself—which is true, as every writer understands. Giving our characters some of our personal traits does not make them miniatures of us. I think it makes them human.

In a similar way, an author’s incorporating themes and experiences from his or her life into a story does not make it an autobiography or a manifesto.

They do not write those things in, hoping someone will say “Wow, I guess he really hated his father!” Even if a universally negative portrayal of father figures suggests the author’s toxic parental relationship. They write those things in because no one wants to tell a story about something they don’t care about. And no one wants to read a story told by someone who doesn’t care about it.

A work will never reflect the whole of the author’s character, nor will it ever be purely a reflection on its creator’s own person. It will also draw from outside the author. But if you look closely, there will always be something subliminally present in the story that the author slipped in. Maybe consciously, hoping the reader doesn’t associate it with him; maybe subconsciously, writing from the unfiltered but cryptic heart. Does that mean a story could be a form of “author-therapy?”

In a sense, perhaps. But I think any story worth its salt will carry some personal ties to the author, and any brave writer will not shrink from including whatever vulnerabilities will make the story more real—even at the risk of “getting caught.”