Authenticity

The word 'authority' by its very nature is loaded with positive and negative connotations, admittedly more negative than positive. In the sense of positive definitions of authority, it is defined as having knowledge and understanding of a subject matter to the point where you can speak on it with confidence. You are for instance an authority to speak on the story of your lived life experience and all that it entails. Whether you can be considered an authority on things like engineering, aviation, politics, economics, or any other subject matter, ultimately comes down to a question of knowledge and experience, which when combined form wisdom.

Authority as a writer is a very interesting concept because ultimately your area of expertise is writing itself, with everything else being considered your background - in other words, knowledge and experience that relates to anything other than writing. Where this distinction rears its head most often is the idea of authenticity in writing. I am a gay, white, man - that last one I use loosely as I'd consider myself more non-binary but that's a topic of conversation to be had some other time. As a gay white man, there are personalities and life experiences that I can write about with authenticity because I can consider myself an authority on those experiences because they are my lived experiences. As a writer however if you only ever write characters from one perspective or one personality, what you write is likely to be very boring.

Collaboration is one of the easiest ways to incorporate the lived experiences of others, each writer contributes the experience they have the authority to speak on, but this is rather limiting if you want to write a piece of work that is more diverse than simply portraying two characters. It's inevitable that you as a writer will have to write characters whose life experiences are nothing like your own. Whether or not you can do that with authenticity depends entirely on whose authority you turn to, and whose expression you deem to be authentic.

The internet makes it easier than it has ever been to connect with others, even more so with others who have life experiences that are nothing like the ones you have had, the problem is that gauging authenticity is difficult when you have no frame of reference to grade that authenticity. If you use social media as a sounding board and follow a bunch of people, hoping to get an insight into their real life and use that as a basis for character development, then your work is likely to come off as trite for the plain and simple reason that social media is more often disingenuous, air brushed, exaggerated, and laced with sarcasm and satire as a coping mechanism for the depressing nature of the reality of life. Everyone has good days and bad days, everyone has ups and downs, but if you take social media profiles at face value then sometime live a life free of all negativity - I don't believe that for a second, as I have said any number of times before, I do not trust someone who smiles all the time it makes me think they have something to hide.

Finding authenticity online is a lot harder than we think, there's no end of people wanting to share their lives with the world, some sharing "every intimate detail" but whether that's actually what they are doing is harder to discern. If what you communicate is 20% what you say and 80% how you say it then at most you can see 20% of a person's life through their online presence and that's assuming they are completely open and honest and don't hold anything back. In reality no matter how open they may claim to be, there's always more to their story, more goes unsaid than we can ever know. To be fair this isn't always a case of trying to manipulate others, sometimes it's a genuine limitation of what can be communicated through language alone, why so many people online who live their lives in front of a camera will tell you that you can never really know someone until you have met them.

So the question remains, as a writer how do you tell another person's story? How do you incorporate characters into your narrative that don't look like you, don't sound like you, and don't think like you? One suggestion is to read autobiographies written by others telling their life stories but my immediate criticism of that option is that publishing removes the voice of the author during the editing process. As grammar is structured, as tone is adjusted, as tense gets manipulated, and the narrative formed, what you read is less a stream of consciousness and more a collection of recollections pinned together to form a work of fiction loosely based on fact. Again this doesn't happen because of the desire to mislead, although in some cases I am sure it does; in most cases it happens because you're taking something that is inherently disorderly as life itself is, and structuring it into something that is inherently ordered, linear, and progressive - unless you write an autobiography in the style of House of Leaves which would likely take more effort than most authors would be willing to devote, there's a reason esoteric literature of this nature is rare.

I don't have an answer to this question, I think in most cases the answer takes the form of the author's arrogance, the greater that is, the more willing they are to write characters based on real people whose lives they assume they understand, whilst those of lesser arrogance will be less willing to write from perspectives beyond their own, the unfortunate ramification is that those authors will only ever write derivative works, with characters that are essentially all the same person in different guises.