There Aren’t Any White Hats on the Internet
Everybody is somebody’s villain
If there’s anything difficult about nonfiction writing, it’s closing the gap between the story and the reader. It’s easy enough to tell what happened and why it matters, but that doesn’t bring people along for the ride. Managing a reader’s reaction means tapping into their point of view.
If you read through to the end of one of my stories and don’t get it, that means I failed. Maybe I didn’t convince you with the premise or didn’t provide sufficient evidence. Sometimes I try too hard to sound clever and leave breadcrumbs for ideas that would be better served by explicit signage. Sometimes I’m just unintentionally oblique.
Social media is the place I’m most likely to miss the mark because I assume everyone occupies the same headspace, mine. I forget that I’m only the hero of my own story. Maybe we should amend “There are two sides to every story,” to add, “and every story needs a bad guy.”
No matter how many Rashomons or Wickeds make it into pop culture, it’s still an easy…
