I don't get profiles.
As a writers' resource, I understand interviewing writers about their process. I see the value in knowing how other people work, what veteran journalists have to say about the ethics and issues of the field. In other words, in a trade-specific way, I comprehend the desire to pull back the curtain.
But in a more general sense, I've always had a problem with profiles and character studies. What could be a more vague assignment than writing about a person? True, subjects are typically amusing characters or those who have done something deemed extraordinary, which I suppose makes them of public interest and therefore story-worthy. The problem I have is of a profile's inability to be all-encompassing. Let me draw that out (and concede how easily reductive this argument could become). They shouldn't be exhaustive for obvious reasons of length and interest, but then that forces the profile into the momentary or perhaps episodic. The challenge, then, is to make that specific time matter, to give it consequence beyond how incredibly fleeting and likely, ultimately, unimportant it is. (Did I mention I tend towards nihilism?) It's this necessary inflation (or, on the flipside, willingness to dwell in the pedestrian) that troubles me about personal portraits. I might be the greatest misanthrope of all time, but it is incredibly rare that I care enough about a person to read solely about the character of that person.
For, to me, profiles create a shadowy version of a self. I think everyone acknowledges the write-up can't possibly be accurate, but it can seek to be something resembling the truth. (We could go ahead and extend this to all nonfiction, but that's another discussion.) It's trying to reconstruct a four-dimensional personality on the two-dimensional page. A fool's errand, if you ask me. All you get is the mystique, like a whiff of perfume as a person passes you by.
This is perhaps why I've never been enthralled by "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" or other profiles, and why this is the first time, despite several efforts and a fondness for JJS, that I've made it through John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Mister Lytle." A piece that seeks to tell a person doesn't have enough consequence for me. (Sure, "Lytle" is also the story of southern writing and a generation...but kind of by accident if you ask me.) In these types of pieces, the action works to highlight the character--what happens is token, or taken as illustrative beyond usual ramifications--a collection of tools to build a table with no legs. That's not to say the profiles I've mentioned aren't beautifully written or evocative of time and place and people...
It's just that I'd rather meet the person myself; maybe I don't trust that the writer's given the appropriate details and interpretations, that the subject hasn't been on his best behavior (or showy or otherwise). The process leans so heavily on the interpretive. It's appropriative. I just never know what to make of it. Kind of like when a friend says "Oh you'll love Chris" and then you meet Chris and can't stand him. It's hard to believe another person's characterization without confirming it yourself. It could be I'm more prone to suspicion than most.
I'll admit I'm not entirely sure how this is different from more action- or event-oriented stories that happen to have characters in them. It seems to me that in the case of a story-with-characters (as opposed to character-as-story), the roles I've outlined above are switched and people are the tools, rather than the action. The character, rather than being the focus, contributes to some larger idea of The Story and that somehow makes it more okay? Thinking of it this way makes me sound a bit cold and even fatalistic, as if people are "sources" and our (my?) inability to create a portrait is so total that it shouldn't even be attempted. I will say I haven't ever been driven to write a profile, and I'm usually baffled by others' decisions to do so. Why tell someone else's story? (Especially if your subject could very well do it themselves?)
In screenwriting, the premise of crafting a script is that character is action and action is character. If you change one, you have to change the other. It sounds simplistic, and in some ways it is, but knowing what a person does in a certain situation can be illuminating, if only in the context of ourselves. (The "Don't go in there!" horror cliche comes to mind. You wouldn't go in that room because of your more objective knowledge of the situation, but the guileless character does go in the room, and that discrepancy is part of the fun of the genre.) This is the realm of philosophical quandaries: am I made up of actions, intentions, in/consistency between the two? Which I suppose is my problem. All we have to judge other people on is what we can see and what we can intuit. In nonfiction, isn't it dishonest to present a story based on that? Conversely, in nonfiction, isn't that all we truly have?
These problems might be why (at least from what I've noticed) the "I" so often comes up in profile pieces. Sullivan tells the story of Lytle from his own point of view, making sure we know he's young and foolhardy and overly-forgiving. That just might be enough to let his story be true and less discomfortingly appropriative. Perhaps I'm more comfortable with writers dissecting themselves--though there's clearly great possibility for error and blindness, at least the mistakes aren't made towards someone else. But then I have a hard time going beyond the fact that the story is more of the writer's view of the person, which is far from a profile and more of a film version, a documentary with an obvious, limited purview. Maybe this is all assumed and I've somehow missed that positional acknowledgement. But I'm wary of readers walking away from profiles saying "I feel like I know the person." Who do they really know?
It seems we trust the observer more than the participant, privileging the outsider over the in. I can't help but think of science here and wonder if the scientific revolution has something to do with it. Suddenly, we were no longer the center of the universe. The world stopped being a combination of the nebulous earth and air and wind and fire and instead became a series of pieces, of atoms to be studied, calculated, and analyzed. People as objects to be recreated, with a dash of irrepressible mysticism mixed in: you can't know the person, but you can try. It's the attempt that counts; the hypothesis of a person to test ourselves against.
This might be disproving my own point.
For a while, I contemplated doing a profile of my childhood dog as a piece of my manuscript, mostly as an attempt to expose the tropes of profiling and highlight some of its stranger aspects. Buddy can't talk of course, but in a way similar to people I've met, I feel like I know him, like I could write a decent characterization of him. Is his tendency to burrow under blankets and sleep most of the day indicative of depression? A symbolic gesture that he's scared of the world, that he feels alone and isolated when my mother--his object of worship--isn't home? Totally unremarkable? Could he just be lazy? I know this is bordering absurd, but I wonder why we think we can extrapolate character from a human in similar ways. Is observing another person for however extended period of time enough to know them? To accurately and truthfully tell a story of them? Taken to its extreme, this line of thought probably extends into memoir: what makes us think we can know ourselves enough to accurately represent our essential character either? I'm not sure, to be honest, and I'm probably muddying the waters more than is necessary, but I can't help but think about it. What is the ultimate project we're doing here, all our truth-telling? Does all writing boil down to Here's the way I see this?
This isn't all to say that I don't think we should try to write about other people or ourselves. And I'm not at all calling for a disclaimer or explanation on every character piece (lord, how I hate disclaimers!). I just wonder what constitutes as honesty in depicting another person and what we fundamentally get from such a project. What do I really know about Mister Lytle by the end of Sullivan's piece? It could be that's the crux of a character story--a reminder that we don't really know or understand anyone, and there's a kind of beauty in recognizing that. A gift from the writer: Here is a moment I've done something with, tried to make sense of, and we're left to do with it what we will.
As a writers' resource, I understand interviewing writers about their process. I see the value in knowing how other people work, what veteran journalists have to say about the ethics and issues of the field. In other words, in a trade-specific way, I comprehend the desire to pull back the curtain.
But in a more general sense, I've always had a problem with profiles and character studies. What could be a more vague assignment than writing about a person? True, subjects are typically amusing characters or those who have done something deemed extraordinary, which I suppose makes them of public interest and therefore story-worthy. The problem I have is of a profile's inability to be all-encompassing. Let me draw that out (and concede how easily reductive this argument could become). They shouldn't be exhaustive for obvious reasons of length and interest, but then that forces the profile into the momentary or perhaps episodic. The challenge, then, is to make that specific time matter, to give it consequence beyond how incredibly fleeting and likely, ultimately, unimportant it is. (Did I mention I tend towards nihilism?) It's this necessary inflation (or, on the flipside, willingness to dwell in the pedestrian) that troubles me about personal portraits. I might be the greatest misanthrope of all time, but it is incredibly rare that I care enough about a person to read solely about the character of that person.
For, to me, profiles create a shadowy version of a self. I think everyone acknowledges the write-up can't possibly be accurate, but it can seek to be something resembling the truth. (We could go ahead and extend this to all nonfiction, but that's another discussion.) It's trying to reconstruct a four-dimensional personality on the two-dimensional page. A fool's errand, if you ask me. All you get is the mystique, like a whiff of perfume as a person passes you by.
This is perhaps why I've never been enthralled by "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" or other profiles, and why this is the first time, despite several efforts and a fondness for JJS, that I've made it through John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Mister Lytle." A piece that seeks to tell a person doesn't have enough consequence for me. (Sure, "Lytle" is also the story of southern writing and a generation...but kind of by accident if you ask me.) In these types of pieces, the action works to highlight the character--what happens is token, or taken as illustrative beyond usual ramifications--a collection of tools to build a table with no legs. That's not to say the profiles I've mentioned aren't beautifully written or evocative of time and place and people...
It's just that I'd rather meet the person myself; maybe I don't trust that the writer's given the appropriate details and interpretations, that the subject hasn't been on his best behavior (or showy or otherwise). The process leans so heavily on the interpretive. It's appropriative. I just never know what to make of it. Kind of like when a friend says "Oh you'll love Chris" and then you meet Chris and can't stand him. It's hard to believe another person's characterization without confirming it yourself. It could be I'm more prone to suspicion than most.
I'll admit I'm not entirely sure how this is different from more action- or event-oriented stories that happen to have characters in them. It seems to me that in the case of a story-with-characters (as opposed to character-as-story), the roles I've outlined above are switched and people are the tools, rather than the action. The character, rather than being the focus, contributes to some larger idea of The Story and that somehow makes it more okay? Thinking of it this way makes me sound a bit cold and even fatalistic, as if people are "sources" and our (my?) inability to create a portrait is so total that it shouldn't even be attempted. I will say I haven't ever been driven to write a profile, and I'm usually baffled by others' decisions to do so. Why tell someone else's story? (Especially if your subject could very well do it themselves?)
In screenwriting, the premise of crafting a script is that character is action and action is character. If you change one, you have to change the other. It sounds simplistic, and in some ways it is, but knowing what a person does in a certain situation can be illuminating, if only in the context of ourselves. (The "Don't go in there!" horror cliche comes to mind. You wouldn't go in that room because of your more objective knowledge of the situation, but the guileless character does go in the room, and that discrepancy is part of the fun of the genre.) This is the realm of philosophical quandaries: am I made up of actions, intentions, in/consistency between the two? Which I suppose is my problem. All we have to judge other people on is what we can see and what we can intuit. In nonfiction, isn't it dishonest to present a story based on that? Conversely, in nonfiction, isn't that all we truly have?
These problems might be why (at least from what I've noticed) the "I" so often comes up in profile pieces. Sullivan tells the story of Lytle from his own point of view, making sure we know he's young and foolhardy and overly-forgiving. That just might be enough to let his story be true and less discomfortingly appropriative. Perhaps I'm more comfortable with writers dissecting themselves--though there's clearly great possibility for error and blindness, at least the mistakes aren't made towards someone else. But then I have a hard time going beyond the fact that the story is more of the writer's view of the person, which is far from a profile and more of a film version, a documentary with an obvious, limited purview. Maybe this is all assumed and I've somehow missed that positional acknowledgement. But I'm wary of readers walking away from profiles saying "I feel like I know the person." Who do they really know?
It seems we trust the observer more than the participant, privileging the outsider over the in. I can't help but think of science here and wonder if the scientific revolution has something to do with it. Suddenly, we were no longer the center of the universe. The world stopped being a combination of the nebulous earth and air and wind and fire and instead became a series of pieces, of atoms to be studied, calculated, and analyzed. People as objects to be recreated, with a dash of irrepressible mysticism mixed in: you can't know the person, but you can try. It's the attempt that counts; the hypothesis of a person to test ourselves against.
This might be disproving my own point.
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| Couldn't resist a picture. Cutest inbred dog around, right? |
This isn't all to say that I don't think we should try to write about other people or ourselves. And I'm not at all calling for a disclaimer or explanation on every character piece (lord, how I hate disclaimers!). I just wonder what constitutes as honesty in depicting another person and what we fundamentally get from such a project. What do I really know about Mister Lytle by the end of Sullivan's piece? It could be that's the crux of a character story--a reminder that we don't really know or understand anyone, and there's a kind of beauty in recognizing that. A gift from the writer: Here is a moment I've done something with, tried to make sense of, and we're left to do with it what we will.
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