There are writers and there are stories. This, as it happens, is a story about a writer. Sounds simple enough, right? Here’s the rub. The writer doesn’t want the story to be about him.

What am I supposed to do with that?

He’s not a recluse. He doesn’t suffer from social anxiety disorder. Though, I must admit, he is terrible at small talk. He’s just a writer. Which may be its own kind of neurosis—after all, his favorite thing to do is sit alone in a room in front of a keyboard and spend the day moving imaginary characters around on a page.

The thing is, although writers and stories are intimately connected, they’re also separate and distinct. And he wants the story to come first. This may be one of the few things on which we agree.

“The story must stand on its own.”

In his marvelous book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud compared illustrated faces with varying amounts of detail. The face with the most detail, the one rendered to be the most realistic, became a specific individual. But when he abstracted it, removing detail until it was just a circle with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth the drawing expanded to become an icon of a face. Essentially, representing no face in particular but rather all faces in general.

Brilliant. Problem solved.

I’ll dissolve the writer’s identity by discarding specifics about him. I’ll dispose of his name and simply refer to him as “the writer*.” By leaving out specifics like height, weight, eye color, distinguishing birthmarks, or any mention of his addiction to peanut butter I can minimize the focus on him and keep the attention where is should be—on the story.

Besides, there are a couple other noteworthy components to this story. There’s me for one, the narrator. I’ll tell you a more about me in subsequent chapters. (I’m freakin’ adorable.) And then there’s you—the reader.