A few years ago, I saw a meme that I still think and chuckle about. It said, “Don’t piss writers off, or else we’ll describe you.”

Before diving into creative writing, I started my career in corporate America, where objective reporting on “key performance indicators” was paramount. Flattening your perspective and conforming to this data-first mode of seeing the world was elevated as a virtue. Failing to keep your cognitive biases in check quickly eroded your credibility.

This impartiality is great for business but downright poisonous for writing. As a writer, you have to lean in, hard, into your own gaze. As Miles Davis said, it takes a long time to sound like yourself. And as artists, we do ourselves no favors by remaining unbiased.

When I’m reading pieces for Hunger Mountain (submissions are open!!), I notice this objective-subjective tension most with character descriptions. Stories that don’t make the cut often rely on descriptions of character’s physical appearance—they have a “head full of curls” or “weathered hands”? Ok, so what? The more memorable pieces tend to highlight a character’s idiosyncrasies instead.

I’ve never read Stephen King’s novels, but he has a great passage about this in On Writing:

What I’m taking away is that your descriptions should be written in such a way that if this person ever came across it scribbled in your diary, they might become mortified and develop a complex about it. I’ll end with another apt quote from On Writing, “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

Jamie

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