Schneider, Pat. "The Ethical Questions: Spirituality, Privacy, and Politics." Writing Alone and With Others. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

This chapter addresses what creative writing professors might forget about when they concentrate solely on craft: the consequence of writing. "Whether we write as an act of personal discovery, as form of prayer in the sense of the deepest cry and search of our spirits, or as a means of having a voice in the world, writing can be a fundamental act of the human spirit" (157). The writing will have more than craft concerns for the beginning (or even advanced) writer; he or she will have also put something of themselves into the writing, from which it might be difficult to separate when a critique is offered.

The consequence is also upon those affected by the writing. When we write we do not only reveal a part of ourselves that we might consider vulnerable, but we might also reveal some material about other people's lives. "Privacy for the writer is a personal question, but it is also an ethical question ... Everyone's boundaries are his or her own; what would be intolerable self-revelation to one person is of no consequence to another. I have more than one friend who writes in journals in times of great stress and then destroys them. I know the danger in keeping a journal; someone may know who I really am ...

"I know that my writing has drawn people to me, and it has pushed people away. i know that the 'me' revealed on my pages is not always the 'me' that is seen across the table at the local deli. i know that some of my former friends can't deal with the more complicated 'me' they meet on my pages. I can't help that. From the time I was ten years old and wrote my first poem, writing has been the way that I survive, and it has been my art form" (159-160).

Because I was initially a newspaper journalist, I know all too well the consequence of writing about others. In fact, at my college we constantly struggle with community members who become part of our news on a small campus -- those who believe we're writing "sensationally" or that we'll "ruin them" if we write about a news issue that faces our campus. Writing makes the issue at hand more real for them, of more consequence -- as though no one was actually talking about the issue until we wrote about it (which isn't true; we generally get our news because our community is talking about it).

But even in non-fiction, we might need to decide how comfortable we are in revealing our "sources" or the people in our lives we choose to write about. I've currently a student who will still change the names of her "characters" in her non-fiction; apparently it gives her a comfort zone, even though I told her that non-fiction must always be true. Schneider says that she has received letters from people who read her books and draw exception that they must write the truth. (For those who can't, my suggestion would be that they can imbed their truth into fiction, disguising the people they know and the situations they face.)

However, the writer must find their comfort zone in what they want to reveal. Schneider says she doesn't write about her adult children because she thinks their lives are now their own, as opposed to when she was raising them. Other times, she will ask for permission to write about other people's lives. I don't ask; I figure if someone has come into my life (with the exception of students, who should receive privacy from me as they learn), they've become part of me, and I am free to write about my experiences, no matter who they include. If i didn't include the people who affect me in my writing, I wouldn't be revealing my truths -- and my writing wouldn't be as strong.