“It’s a catastrophe for a woman to be loved by a writer,” Robert was saying. “She believed everything Perron told her about herself.”

- Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

But here’s the thing: just as party photographers capture events at their most exciting possible moments and from their best possible angles, so too are we writers able to capture people from their most beautiful, intriguing angles.

That’s not say that what we write is untrue, only that by necessity it captures only a small part of any human being. As anyone who’s ever been profiled in the press - or seen an event or situation they’re close to profiled in the press - knows, there’s always a lot that is left out. A narrative is determined as much by what is omitted as by what is included.

Take a story I wrote for Cosmo recently, which should show up around November. When I sent it to a couple of sources for fact checking, one wrote back saying she wished she was more like the girl in my lead case study. “That’s kind of the point of the story,” I said to her. (Although you’ll be glad to know the story also includes very practical tips on how to do that, which I firmly believe will change your life and make it more magical, although god knows doing so requires expending a fair bit of energy.)

When I relayed this to said case study a few days later, she laughed and said she had thought the same thing when she’d read the story. Because even though everything written was entirely factual - she does lead an exceptionally interesting existence, certainly moreso than anyone else I’ve ever met - it covered only a small portion of her life.

It was a true reflection of her, but it was a reflection of her through my eyes and for the purposes of sharing a specific story.

Of course, there’s something lovely about being reflected in that way. It’s why we cling to love letters years after they are written (text messages are nice, but they are no substitute). A friend of mine once took a sentence I wrote about her for a story and plonked it at the top of her professional bio: “a natural, luminescent beauty and a mind that makes you want to talk to her for hours.” All true - her beauty is of the natural, luminscent variety, and she is a fascinating conversationalist - but also lovely to see yourself through somebody else’s loving eyes.

It strikes me that ‘It’ people - or at least the ones that are sold to us through magazines and the like - are not naturally in possession of that “certain something” so much as they are imbued with it through the repeated endowment of flattering camera angles and flattering words. ‘Muses’ are just folks creative people have come to care for, and decided to share the beauty they see - the beauty we all see in the people we care about - with the world.

Instead of feeling shit about it, why not bring out the magic in the people you know?

Related: Making magic: you are not your wardrobe
Making magic, part 2: on the tyranny of image
Have you ever seen yourself through someone else’s eyes?
The secret lives of beautiful women