Is your writing your ‘letter to the world?’ Why? How?

God, I hope not all my writing. Otherwise, the stuff I wrote when I was in first school would be considered my ‘letter to the world’ and that stuff was terrible. Also prime ‘creep out the psychologist’ material for I was a strange and morbid child with dreams of being a wizard and RULING THE WORLD FROM MY NEO-GOTHIC TOWER OF DESPAIR MWHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

*cough*

Yes, I did know what ‘neo-gothic’ referred to whilst in first school.

Anyway, I agree that some of a person’s writing is their letter to the world, especially if they put it up for publishing. If the writer does not publish or intend to publish, then it cannot be counted as a ‘letter to the world’. This would include many of the works of Emily Dickinson and Franz Kafka. (Logically, this would make their friends who published these works once Kafka and Dickinson were dead, and therefore unable to object, somewhat bad friends.)

However, I do not think that writing is necessarily a direct letter to the world. For example, most* people do not think that Jonathan Swift was actually advocating the eating of babies whilst writing A Modest Proposal – instead he was satirizing the responses of the British Government to the Irish Famine. Given the sheer volume of debate over many literary works, I would say that most writing comes under this category. And of course, what one intends to write in one’s letter to the world may not be what the recipients read into it. Stephenie Meyer probably thinks she wrote a delightful sparkly vampire romance, and yet I have seen people read the following into it: that she is unhappy with her life choices, that she has a disturbing obsession with twu wuv that overrules reasonable limits and free will, that she has a variety of interesting fetishes, and that she is living proof that it is possible to get an English Literature degree without doing any more than skim-reading a few classics.

In conclusion, I would say that work that is published with your consent is your letter to the world. Work published without your consent is more akin to someone finding your personal journal and sticking it up all over town. 

This also means that Tara Gilesbie’s masterpiece My Immortal is her letter to the world, whether it is a satire of terrible Harry Potter fanfiction that questions narrative conventions of plot, consistent characterisation or the rules of spelling and grammar, or merely hilariously terrible Harry Potter fanfiction. 

Happy nightmares, former bad fanfiction writers everyone.

* I say most. There’s always one.