The strange paradox of being an author - why do we ask people who disappear into their heads to spend so much time talking about themselves?

 There’s something slightly odd about being an author/writer. We can spend months, sometimes years, working alone making things up, becoming fascinated by people who don't exist, and conversations that never happened. Most of us even look forward to it (though there are moments where the laptop is close to be flung out of the window). Give a writer a notebook/laptop, a cup of coffee and an uninterrupted afternoon, and they'll be perfectly happy. Though they may well be grumpy by the end of it after deleting chunks of what they just wrote (IYKYK).

Then you finish the book and discover that apparently the next thing you're supposed to do is talk to lots of people. Not just occasionally, either. You're expected to build a social media following, post regularly, engage with readers, attend events, give talks, go to festivals, network with other writers, appear on podcasts, make videos and generally become a recognisable human being who can be found in several places at once. Ideally, you should do all this while writing your next book, maintaining a website, answering emails, remembering what day it is, holding down a full-time job and raising a family.

It seems a tad ridiculous.

The people who make the stories

Many writers describe themselves as introverts. There are also plenty who are neurodivergent, although neither of those things applies to every writer, and neither tells you everything about a person (but I raise my hand up for both). Introverts can be brilliant public speakers (hello, I’m waving again), neurodivergent people can love socialising (I’m down here behind the sofa). Some writers are even perfectly capable of holding court at a party until the last guest has gone home. They may even be the person who organised the party in the first place (ooh I did a little shudder there!)

But for many of us, writing offers something that can be difficult to find anywhere else. It gives us the freedom to think deeply, follow an idea wherever it leads, notice things other people might overlook and to spend time exploring the complicated business of being human without having to do it in front of an audience.

When you write you can stop and start a conversation (difficult to do in person, I’ve tried). You can rewrite something because the first version didn't quite say what you meant. You can spend three hours thinking about a single sentence without someone asking whether you're feeling all right or explore a difficult subject at your own pace, without having to process somebody else's facial expression while you're doing it.

For many, solitude isn't loneliness. It's where the interesting stuff happens and ideas have room to develop.

The strange thing is that the publishing world then says, "Excellent. Now go and be sociable."

The writer as a brand

Somewhere along the way, being an author seems to have become about rather more than writing books. Obviously, writers have always needed readers. Authors have, for many years, done interviews, signed books, visited schools, appeared at literary festivals and talked about their work. There’s nothing particularly new about being expected to let people know that your book exists. Let’s face it, it is kind of essential.

But social media has changed the scale of it. Now there’s an expectation that an author should have a presence, and not just a website with a photograph, a short biography and a list of books. You need to be active. You need to be engaging. You need to give people a reason to follow you, preferably every day, and ideally in a way that makes them feel they have discovered a fascinating person rather than someone who would just like them to buy a novel.

And there are so many platforms to choose from that keeping up with them all becomes a full-time job. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, Threads, newsletters, podcasts and whatever new platform has appeared since I started writing this sentence. Each has its own audience, its own unwritten rules and its own advice about what you should be doing to attract attention. Apparently, it isn't enough to write a book anymore. You need to become a small media company with a literary side hustle.

And the irony is difficult to ignore. The writer is encouraged to become a personality, while the work itself risks becoming just one more thing that personality happens to sell.

But what if you don't want to perform?

There’s a difference between communicating and performing, and I think it's an important one. I can (when pushed) talk to people about books, ideas, nature, science, writing and all sorts of strange things that can send a perfectly ordinary conversation somewhere completely unexpected (and usually makes them run for the hills when I’ve missed the social queue that I’ve been going on for too long). Give me an interesting question and I can happily spend hours exploring it (you see, I told you I could go on for too long, I mean, look at the length of this article!). But insist I make video explaining why people should follow me, suddenly I become fascinated by the leaf blowing about outside.

The problem isn't necessarily talking to people. It's the feeling that you should constantly be presenting a version of yourself to an audience. What are you doing today? What are you thinking about? What are you reading? What are you writing? What did you have for breakfast? What is your writing routine? What is your biggest fear? What would you say to your younger self? And, most importantly, can you turn any of those things into a short video with a compelling opening in three seconds?

Perhaps some people genuinely enjoy all of this. Good for them. If you love making videos, chatting to strangers and sharing your life online, I hope you have a wonderful time (and would you mind doing it for me for free? Thanks). But there’s something philosophically strange about telling a person who makes a living creating fictional people that their own personality now needs to become part of the product.

Why do we assume that somebody who is good at writing is necessarily good at performing?

They are completely different skills. A brilliant novelist might be terrible at public speaking. A brilliant public speaker might struggle to write a novel. Someone can be fascinating in conversation but produce dreadful prose, while someone else can barely string three sentences together when asked a question unexpectedly but write a book that keeps you awake until two in the morning.

We don't expect musicians to be good comedians, or painters to be entertaining interviewers. Yet authors are increasingly expected to be writers, marketers, presenters, social media managers, photographers, content creators and public personalities, all while finding time to write the next book (unless of course you’re already a celebrity in which case it seems the publishing industry will give you a contract for writing some words on the back of an envelope, yes I went there).

I sometimes wonder what would happen if we applied the same expectations to other professions. Imagine a plumber being told that, before anyone would trust them to fix a leaking tap, they needed to build an Instagram following, post three times a week and develop a recognisable personal brand. The tap would still be leaking, but at least the plumber would have excellent engagement.

So (and I’m just throwing this out there) maybe we're measuring the wrong thing

There's an interesting assumption behind all of this: that visibility equals value. The author with 100,000 followers looks successful. The author who posts every day looks engaged or who gives brilliant talks looks confident. But none of those things tells us whether they can write. It doesn’t tell us whether the book is moving, funny, frightening, original or beautifully observed. It certainly doesn’t tell us whether a reader will remember a character years after finishing the story, or their novel will make someone see the world differently.

Imagine deciding that a painter's work is less interesting because they don’t post enough behind-the-scenes photographs; or judge a composer by how entertaining they were at dinner. It sounds ridiculous when you put it like that, yet authors increasingly find themselves judged, at least in part, by exactly these things.

Of course, an author with a large, engaged following has an advantage when it comes to reaching readers. Publishers have limited resources, and an existing audience is useful. But the ability to attract attention and the ability to write a good book are not the same thing. One might help sell the other, but that doesn't make them interchangeable.

The neurodivergent question

This becomes particularly interesting when you consider neurodivergent authors. There’s enormous variation within neurodivergence, and it’d be a mistake to assume that every neurodivergent person dislikes social interaction, struggles with public speaking or finds online communication difficult. Some people find social media a brilliant way to connect with others, particularly when face-to-face interaction can be tiring or unpredictable.

But some people do experience social situations differently. Crowds can be exhausting. Unexpected questions difficult. Switching rapidly between tasks may take considerable effort, and maintaining an apparently effortless online presence demands far more energy than other people realise.

Now add the expectation to post regularly, engage, network, attend events, smile for photographs, make videos and talk about yourself. And do it enthusiastically, because nobody wants to follow someone who looks as though they're being held hostage.

For some authors, this is simply another part of the job. But for others, it’s draining, stressful and difficult to sustain alongside the work itself. And there’s something uncomfortable about a system that can turn someone's neurological differences into a professional disadvantage, then interpret the resulting difficulty as a lack of ambition or commitment.

Maybe the problem isn't connection

Of course, I don't think the answer is to abandon social media or declare that authors should never have to leave their houses. Writing is communication. Readers matter, and books need to find their audiences. Social media can be genuinely transformative, particularly for writers who might otherwise struggle to reach readers or find a community. It can certainly bring people together across enormous distances and help writers share ideas, discover opportunities and support one another. It also allows readers to feel connected to the person behind a book, which is a lovely thing.

And that's an important distinction.

There’s a difference between wanting to talk about your work and feeling that you must constantly manufacture reasons to talk about it. There’s a difference between finding readers and trying to satisfy an algorithm that seems to change its mind every time you work out what it wants; a difference between sharing something meaningful and posting a photograph of your coffee because apparently the internet needs to know that you’re still alive.

The writer's job

I've been thinking about this because there’s a strange danger in becoming too concerned with being an author (I’ll pause while you ponder on that though watch out for those frown lines). What do I mean by that? Well. you could end up spending so much time talking about writing that you aren't actually writing; where you become obsessed with algorithms, engagement, follower counts and visibility and slowly find yourself doing everything except the thing that made you want to become an author in the first place.

Which is making stories.

For me, that's the bit I have to keep coming back to. The strange ideas, the "what if?" questions, the things I notice while walking somewhere that make me stop and think.  That's where the books come from. Not from an engagement strategy, a posting schedule or a carefully curated photograph of me looking thoughtful beside a bookshelf. They come from curiosity, observation, imagination and the time to follow an idea wherever it leads.

And that time has to come from somewhere.

Coming fully back in a weird swirly loop, maybe there is a better question

Maybe we shouldn't be asking writers how good they are at being visible. Perhaps we should be asking how good they are at making us see something differently. Because that's what writers can do. They can take something ordinary and make it strange or take something strange and make it familiar. They can make you care about somebody who doesn't exist, frighten you with something you've walked past every day, or take a question you thought had an obvious answer and quietly remove the certainty underneath it.

None of that requires a huge following or a perfect author photograph, a daily video or the ability to deliver a witty answer while somebody points a microphone at you. It requires curiosity and imagination.

Which brings me back to the paradox. We need writers to create the things that make us think, feel, question and imagine. Yet we increasingly expect those writers to spend a considerable amount of their time doing things that can leave them with less time and energy to create.

So, what’s the answer? I don’t know…genuinely.

But somewhere along the line authors, writers, whatever the label, need to be able to write. After all, the writer who disappears into their own head isn't avoiding the world. They’re busy making another one. And if you happen to be waiting for them to post about it, you might have to wait longer for the finished article because they're trying to get the ending right.