love out loud: to censor or not to censor?

A few days ago, I had my first experience with outwardly not being told something because Bob Dylan was concerned I might write about it. He eventually told me because he tells me everything (even though he likes to pretend this isn’t the case) but it did raise an issue that has become rather pressing over the last few months.

When I meet someone new, at some point it tends to come up that I write a column about relationships but those who have been/are/whatever in my life have never asked to be written about. As much as I don’t want to piss people off, I also think that giving someone veto power over your work is opening dangerous floodgates.

Nonetheless, this is still an important consideration when you’re putting details of someone else’s life on display. Only two people have ever explicitly told me not to write about them (both being requests I have since ignored), and writing this column has been a good exercise in deducing where that all-important line is in what I can and even should write about.

Although anyone who wants to put something that they’ve created into the public domain is invariably going to use aspects of their own life, the fact that I write about relationships, and more specifically my own, means that my revelations tend to be more overt than someone who’s, say, channeling their unrequited love for an ethereal Zooey Deschanel-esque being into a painting.

There are multiple sides to every story but the version that makes it into print is the one that moves from anecdote to truth, and I suspect that this has at least partly motivated some of my friends to tell me that they would never date a writer (and may also go some way in explaining why I have been convincingly single since I started writing this column). Most of my friends and family flit between wanting to have done something I would write about and an unwillingness to tell me something just in case I use it as fodder.

Fortunately, this is a pretty lightweight problem at this point, and maybe that’s why it’s entirely redundant for me to even be thinking about it. I have no delusions about my immediate family and closest friends currently comprising most of my audience (and this is only because I send them weekly quizzes to ensure they’ve read the content), but it’s something that I imagine every writer/artist/whatever has to consider at some stage of their career.

But until I get the demands in writing, I’m probably going to keep writing about people who don’t want to be written about.

(Image credits: 1.)