A Cow with a Hole in It

the idea of vulnerability, and its different levels of meaning: vulnerability as a window, and vulnerability as a wound.

“If I told someone to be more vulnerable in an essay or book, what I would mean is that not everything the reader needs is making it onto the page,” I wrote to her. “You want people to understand and relate to your story, not just intellectually but viscerally—but there are certain tools and information you have to give them to do that.

When editors ask you to be vulnerable, what they really want is for you to be permeable, for the windows you place in your defenses to offer a sense of the area beyond. The walls don’t need to be breached, and they don’t need to come all the way down in a way that puts you in danger. Hence our guiding light, the cow with a hole—who is in no danger ... See more

Vulnerability in writing is a precision tool.“ If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known,” Tim Kreider wrote in a New York Times opinion piece that has since become a wildly popular Tumblr meme.

Vulnerability in writing is a precision tool. The process of spilling your guts isn’t vulnerability—it’s purgation. (Still useful, from an emotional perspective! But not necessarily in the service of art.) So maybe what we actually need is a better word than vulnerability to describe the specific kind of peephole we open up in personal writing—vuln... See more